Draft night may appear to be a pressure cooker environment, with the future direction of football clubs hanging in the balance and their future success determined by the names read out on the night.
But for Gold Coast SUNS List Manager Scott Clayton and his recruiting team, draft night is relaxing. They have a plan with every contingency imaginable in place and every scenario mapped out. All they need to do on the night is execute their mission.
“We won’t be making any decisions on draft night. I think that’s the simplest way to say it,” Clayton explained to goldcoastfc.com.au in the lead up to the national draft.
“We will have run every scenario before the night. It’s the most relaxing night of all time. We are done. There will be no surprises. Every scenario is run.
“We spend the weeks leading into draft night running through every possible scenario. We have all our contingencies in place.
“We run through every scenario that may unfold: ‘What if this guy’s still there, what if that guy’s still there, what if we’d taken this guy with our first pick and not this guy’ – how does that affect the rest of the picks.”
Draft night is the culmination of a massive body of work. Some of the players selected have been closely monitored for three, four or even five years. Hence the importance of work shopping every scenario possible to deflate the pressure on the night and ensure calculated decisions are made.
“We already know what we are going to do. And even to the point where we’ve run scenarios with respect to bidding,” SUNS list manager Dom Ambrogio explained.
“So on the day we’ve taken all the heat out of it and all the pressure out of it so we don’t make decisions under pressure that we look back on and say ‘Shit, we panicked, why did we do that?’ You just don’t need to do that.”
In this year’s cattle call, Gold Coast holds four selections – No. 6, No. 16, No. 29 and No. 56. Following the recruiting team’s in-depth analysis of every scenario, Clayton is confident of making a calculated guess, weeks out from the draft, on the players they will select on the night.
“We do an enormous amount of work scenario planning beforehand. Those four picks there, if we had a magic envelope and tried to guess now, we’d be pretty confident of ten names,” Clayton said.
“Oh, I was going to say eight. I reckon we could jot down eight names and we’ll nail the four that we’ll end up getting,” Ambrogio quipped.
“As you get closer to the draft you get a reasonable sense of who’s going to be picked up where. There are always surprises, but we workshop those surprises.
“Last year for instance with Touk, at 29, we rated him in our top ten, but we knew that of the blokes we liked, he was most likely to get out the furthest.
“There was real danger that he would have got picked before 29, so we had a few moments where we were sitting there with our fingers crossed.”
