Jonathan Giles was delighted when the GIANTS called his name in the rookie draft at the end of 2010. He didn’t care that he would have to spend another year playing state league football, in the NEAFL. It didn’t worry him that the brand new club’s first AFL match was more than a full year away. Having spent four years on the Port Adelaide list without getting to play in a single senior game, Giles was yearning for a second chance. After a season back at Sturt in the SANFL, he was happy to go anywhere to get it. There was just one little question mark in the back of his mind.

The coach who had delisted him from the Power was Mark Williams. And Williams was on his way to Greater Western Sydney too, to be coach Kevin Sheedy’s key assistant. As happy as he was, Giles couldn’t help but wonder whether things would be better the second time around.

He didn’t have to worry too long. “I loved Choco. I obviously wasn’t playing AFL footy at Port Adelaide so I didn’t have a lot to do with him, but I was definitely on the end of a few of his better sprays over time. And he was the one who delisted me. So that was there in the back of my mind when I got drafted; I was thinking 'I wonder how this is going to be,'” said Giles.

“But I spoke to Choco pretty quickly. He gave me a call within a day of me getting drafted and we had a laugh about the Port days and how excited we both were to be moving up to Sydney. It was a new challenge for both of us. I can remember him saying, ‘yeah, I delisted you, but it was really good to see you bounce back and start to play some good footy at Sturt.’

“I’ve always thought that when you leave somewhere you should do it on good terms, which is how it happened at Port. You never know when the next time you’re going to see someone will be, someone you’ve been through something with. And talking to him put my mind at ease.

"I just remember getting a really positive feeling from him and thinking, ‘let’s get on with it, let’s get up there and see what we can do.’ He’s someone I became friends with, good friends. As a player and a coach he ended up getting a lot out of me but even away from footy – away from the field – he’s someone I’ve really appreciated getting to know.”

As disappointed as he was to be delisted that first time, Giles had also come to see how good it was for him and his football; to spend four years on the Power’s list and not feel close to a game made him work out exactly how badly he wanted to play one. He made the decision to leave Central Districts, where he had played all his junior football, and sign on with Sturt after the Power cut him, thinking it would help him work towards being redrafted because he would get to spend more time in the ruck there. There, he was able to do that. He got fitter, and better used to playing against strong, seasoned opponents and their tricks. He also enjoyed the chance to live a life outside football, and get stuck into some study.

“I look back and I was shattered to leave Port because they drafted me and I had dreams of playing there forever,” he said. “But the Port days were a great learning curve for me. That’s where I think I built a lot of resilience, and going through that experience ended up coming in handy with everything that football threw my way after that, and overall just for life in general.”

Giles was 23 when he moved to Sydney, stepping into a squad filled with a bunch of talented 17-year olds. “Steve Clifton was the other mature age rookie who came up,” he said, “and he was a couple of months older than me, so he was the one who used to get called Fossil. He was the grandpa, which was very lucky for me.” The group had a very different dynamic to the one he had experienced as a teenager – the Power was full of established, senior, premiership players when he got there – and Giles was conscious that everything he and his new, much younger teammates did in their early days together would shape the club’s culture: what it was about, what it stood for, how it functioned.

Giles went on to play for Essendon and West Coast after his time in Sydney ended, and never found another club that valued family as much as the GIANTS did, and needed to.

“It was just so different. At Port Adelaide there were 200-game players and a history and a culture, and here we were in a situation where everything we did was going to be setting the club up for years to come. It was interesting to go there and be a part of that,” he said.

“It was a brand new club and in that NEAFL year none of us knew what playing AFL footy was really like. We were just bumbling our way through it all and working out what to do, but the best thing was that we were all together the time. There’d be dinner Monday night at Rooty Hill RSL for chicken night, then we’d be at the local Thai place on Tuesday, the local Italian place Wednesday. We were together 24/7 and it created a really special connection and bond.

“The other thing is, we had people like Kevin Sheedy and Mark Williams, the Lamberts, Gubby (Graeme) Allan, senior people who had been there and seen it before. We had really good drive as a group and we were ambitious, but the young kids had no idea what it was like at an AFL club so those people were there to show us and talk to us and they really made sure we understood where we had to get to.”

Giles’ first AFL game was the GIANTS’ first game, and he played 51 before deciding at the end of 2014 that it was time to move on. Shane Mumford joined the club from Sydney that season, and slowly Giles' opportunities to play in the senior side started to dry up. It wasn’t a decision he enjoyed making but having found out that he could play, he wanted to play more.

After a knee injury hastened his retirement from West Coast at the end of 2017, he moved into construction management. He’s based in Melbourne with his wife Hannah these days, working for a company called Built that he started with during his time in Perth with the Eagles.

“It was a tough thing, to leave the GIANTS. But for the last half of the year I was playing reserves and just couldn’t really break into the side. I was frustrated because you want to be playing senior football and I wasn’t playing it. I did a lot of thinking towards the back end of the season about what was going to be the best thing for my football, staying or going somewhere else,” he said.

“I loved the club, I loved all the guys and the coaches and everyone. The culture that we had, it was like nothing else I’d seen. We’d have family days but every day was family day, really. People’s parents, cousins, uncles, family friends, whoever it was, they could come up and feel like a part of the club and that’s something I did miss when I decided to go.

“My parents still talk about it, how much they loved the club, how many friends they made coming up to Sydney. Everyone at the club would know what I’m talking about, because everyone who came up to visit would have stories about chatting with some of the players or the coaches, it was such big catalyst in setting up the culture even when we were losing games.

“I’ll always be really fond of the club. They gave me a chance and to go somewhere new, be part of a club that had never existed before and experience all the unknowns of how it was going to go, it was a really good challenge to take on and a really good journey. I had a great time.”