Fremantle coach Mark Harvey shares something in common with fellow senior coaches Geelong’s Mark Thompson and Brisbane’s Leigh Matthews. The trio all won three or more premierships during their distinguished playing careers.

But Thompson, who won three flags along side Mark at Essendon, and Matthews, who won four with Hawthorn, have something that Fremantle’s  coach  is yet to achieve. Thompson (1) and Matthews (4) have both won football’s Holy Grail as coaches.

While Mark has his heart set on achieving September glory as coach of the Fremantle Football Club it will take time, a point he made repeatedly during this interview. It will also require patience on the part of supporters who can have great faith in Mark’s determination to achieve his goal.

When Mark first accepted the job of assistant coach at the Fremantle Football Club, he still had another year to run on his contract at Essendon. Contrary to popular belief it wasn’t the opportunity to be a stalking horse for former coach Chris Connolly’s job that lured him west. After all there were plenty of openings for him as an AFL coach without having to pack up and move his wife and two children from Melbourne to Perth.

“I could’ve gone for six or seven other coaching jobs,” he said.

“But I saw joining the Fremantle Football Club - either as an assistant or a senior coach – as  a bigger  challenge than any other job I could have taken on,” he said.

“Why? Because Fremantle is the only club in the AFL not to have won a premiership.”

“I saw that as a far greater challenge and that’s what really drives me.

“My goal is to get this team to understand how ruthless the game is and then work on developing the winning culture that will be the making of this footy club.”
 
A triple premiership player who played 206 games with Essendon between 1984 and 1997, Mark knows better than most what it takes to succeed at football’s highest level.
It can only help when your coaching staff includes two former dual premiership players in fellow former Bomber Dean Wallis and one half of Brisbane’s feared Scott twins, Chris, plus former Carlton ruckman Earl Spalding who won a flag with the Blues in 1995. Peter German’s coaching successes can also not be undervalued.

Previously an assistant coach at St Kilda and Essendon, Dean played 127 games for the Bombers, including the 1993 and 2000 premierships.

Chris played 215 games with the Lions, including premierships in 2001 and 2002. Injury robbed of him being a part of Brisbane’s history-making third flag in 2003.

Mark believes that the Coaching Department’s premiership winning experience should not be underestimated.

“It is interesting when you sit back and watch guys like Scotty and Wal talk to the group. The players are glued to what they say…and that’s not taking anything away from the other coaches here,” he said.

“When they talk about a time or a reason why they won a game it’s interesting and it’s absolutely going to make an impact.

“Our younger players are all getting involved in the competitive nature of football that’s required to win regularly and I take a lot from that.”

One of the challenges Mark set himself when he accepted the job as senior coach was to establish a winning culture.

“When you go through the experience of winning premierships, you know the philosophy behind how you got there both as a player and as a team…and then you go about instilling that into the playing group along with what you’ve already experienced as a coach,” he said.

“Once again that does take time…and then you teach the players the team ethos and how they should hold themselves on a football ground in every moment that presents itself.”

Despite the pressure of being a senior coach in his first year, Mark is relatively unfazed by the demands of the job. Sure he might have been caught on national television being quite animated in the change rooms at half-time against Brisbane at the Gabba but he can take heart from the fact that Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson won only 5 games in his first year as a senior coach in 2005.

Just three years on and Clarkson’s Hawks are sitting near the top of the ladder and have their loyal supporters contemplating September glory.

 “There are a lot of challenges, particularly in the way the game has changed enormously in the past two years,” Mark said.

“The intensity of the game has gone up…rotations have gone up.”

That’s just one of the on-field challenges to deal with. The off-field demands on a senior coach are another matter.

“It seems almost unique at this club,” he said.

“On a daily basis you area dealing with a huge number of people from your players, to sponsors, the media, the members at times, the board, people that you mentor and others who just walk up to you in the street.”

When Mark gets a chance to take a break from the daily training regime, he regularly makes the short stroll from the Club into Fremantle to get some lunch.

“I call it living on the street as a football person,” said Mark, who strides purposefully along the Port’s street in full club colours.

“At times you’ll get one or two people who want to stop and have a chat about the footy club or you’ll get some one – usually in a car – who’ll yell out ‘Go Eagles’.

“People just want to talk about a player or just say hello. No matter where you go, you always have interaction with people because they want to talk about the footy. That isn’t a problem but occasionally it is good to have a break from it.”

While Mark has had to live with some disappointments in his first year as a coach, nothing has come as a surprise.

“When you’ve coached for  long as a I have, you get an all round view of what it should be,” said Mark, who spent eight years as an assistant to legendary Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy before joining Fremantle as an assistant to Chris Connolly in 2006.

After Connolly resigned following round 15 in 2007, Mark stepped up to the plate in a caretaker role until he was eventually appointed senior coach at the end of last season.

“What I will say is that you need as much time as you can have to actually coach,” he said.

Having dealt with the media regularly during his playing career and latterly as an assistant coach, Mark is conscious of how his relationship with the media changed once he became Fremantle’s senior coach.

“It’s different because the line of questioning is different and the difference between what you get asked as an assistant coach compared to a senior coach is extraordinary,” he said.

“The critical nature in the environment of winning and losing and the sheer volume of reporting that’s done on our game is extensive, so you’ve got expect the unexpected.

There are more than 1500 people with AFL media accreditation and 700 accredited journalists and broadcasters.

Compare that to the relatively small size of the Canberra press gallery, which is responsible for keeping our federal politicians honest, and you see where the rookie senior coach is coming from.

Mark admits to being overly protective of the players when they are exposed to media criticism.

Although it is a rarely used tactic these days, 20 years ago coaches regularly used the media as a conduit to criticise one of their own players.

“I don’t talk to the players through the media because the media does more than enough of it,” he said.

“If I was going to tell a player something, I’d tell him direct, not through the media. The questioning by the media is so much more in-depth now and personal. They want to know what’s going on inside closed doors. They are trying to get deeper into that.”

When Mark first started playing the game there was a senior coach and a reserves coach.  That was it. There was nothing like the brace of assistant coaches that fill the coach’s box in today’s modern game. That’s not all that has changed since Mark first stepped onto Windy Hill back in the mid 80’s. Even the way senior coaches’ talk to their players has altered.

“The game is much more in-depth tactically, so you have to be a lot more instructive that just simply telling a player what to do, or berate him,” he said.

There’s also the Gen Y factor.

“I do take that into consideration,” Mark said.

“One of the arts of coaching is you must always understand the player you are talking to or about when you’re in front of the group.

“You’ve always got introverts and extroverts at a football club. Some players can handle it in front of a group, some can’t.

“Some need motivating, some don’t. Some need to be instructed, some play naturally.”

During the course of this interview Mark took the opportunity to clarify his previously reported comments about “inheriting a list”, a reference to draft choices made before he was appointed senior coach.

“When I said that, it wasn’t personal,” he said.

“All I was doing was alerting people to the fact that I need time to get all that right… and that’s where I’m at. Previous coaches and administrations tried their hearts out to get it right. It didn’t work, so now I’m going to try my hardest to get it right. I wasn’t trying to absolve myself of any blame or distance myself.

“What I do accept is that in the next three years I will be judged in terms of coaching, recruiting and the salary cap.”

But after his first draft as senior coach, Mark has reason to be confident about how he will be judged.

“It’s going to be interesting…and having a look at what I’ve done in my first draft as a coach, I’m glad that we’ve taken the tack of keeping our early draft picks and keeping some young players. It’s been quite different from that in years gone by.

“My philosophy is to keep going that way in the draft, and in the next two to three years, I’ll continue to do that.

“I think guys like Rhys Palmer, Chris Mayne and Clayton Hinkley are going to be long-term prospects for this footy club.”

Despite suggestions to the contrary, Mark is well aware of the need to acknowledge the importance of the Fremantle Football Club’s links to both East and South Fremantle.

“After you’ve lived here for two years, you get a grasp of it but it does take time,” he said.

“I recognise it and I quite regularly mention past champions when we have internal meetings.

“In time I will get some of these guys to be mentors to our players. I don’t need to be ushered by others but in time I will speak to Stephen Michael and guys like that, about taking up that sort of a role.”

It’s no secret that as a mentor Kevin Sheedy had a massive influence over Mark both as a player and a coach. Even as Fremantle battled to put a win on the board earlier in the season, Sheedy had some sound advice for Mark.

“His outlook is always to be positive no matter what the situation,” Mark said.

“You make sure all your staff and players feel like they are contributing and that there is light at the end of the tunnel…don’t become an angry coach and put the blame on other people.”

What is surprising is how Sheedy, who coached Essendon for 27 years and four premierships, motivated Mark during his playing days.

“He always kept me on the edge,” he said.

“Never once did I feel that comfortable about playing in the sense that my spot in the side was secure. And I felt like that right until the end because while Kevin made you feel like you were an important part of the team, you weren’t an automatic selection.

“He was always trying to read your body language and whenever he thought you were wavering, he’d put some self-doubt back into you that would then make you say, ‘I’ve got to do something about that’.

“It didn’t do your head in, instead it made you rise to the challenge and that’s what will happen here in time.”

Sheedy’s influence over Mark as a coach took a different path. In a practical sense, Sheedy would take his coaches “around the world” to increase their “life skills”, and often delved into the history books to make a point or sustain an argument.

“Kevin would always use various aspects of life, be it old boxing tapes or wars and other historic event as tools for motivation,” he said.

“He would draw out, for example, certain historical elements of a war to highlight the vale of raw courage.

“That’s why Anzac Day games were always big for us and he always made sure everyone knew what the day was about.”

Flexibility is another Sheedy trait that Mark values in players.

“You have to be able to play at both ends,” he said.

“The preparation was always based around being fitter than the opposition, therefore you trained harder and had to be mentally strong and physically hard.

“It was old school…along the lines of Tom Hafey.”
 
Old school maybe but elements of it still have their place in today’s approach to coaching.

“There’s a little bit plus your own philosophies and your own personality comes out in you as a coach.”

As an assistant coach Mark was always of the belief that you shouldn’t get “too close” to the players. But that’s changed, particularly when he spends so much time traveling and living at close quarters on road trips with the players.

“We never really had to deal with that,” Mark said.

“Because of the travel involved and six-days breaks some times between trips you have to be astute in every aspect of getting a team up every week.

“Being coach of one of the two West Australian sides is one of the hardest coaching jobs in the AFL because of where you are geographically and the different challenges that presents with the need to get the players up every week.”

It’s not just on the field that a senior coach has responsibility for developing his players.

Mark places great emphasis in mentoring the players off the field and watching them develop not only as successful footballers on the paddock but as quality young men off it.

“It’s not just about developing them as footballers,” he said.

“I like to get them involved in acquiring life skills, so they develop as people and not lose contact with society.

“There are a lot of life skills that can be transferred onto the football field. That can be a person’s demeanor, their personality, their competitiveness. Its little things like that, which I look for to try and help them evolve as a player.

“What I don’t want is for a player to come here and just have football as their focus and that’s it.”

The pitfall, according to Mark, is apart from not “accelerating their growth as a person”, the player’s career can “stagnate”.

“You risk stalling the learning process because in football you have to be two steps ahead of the opposition. The strategy of the game now is that the oppositions know everything about you, how you think…so what can you do to sustain yourself, to get better and keep ahead of them.”

While being an AFL coach involves enormous family sacrifice and seemingly endless waves of pressure, Mark is at ease with how he deals with the demands the job places on him.

“Particularly in-season you haven’t got much of a life as a coach but that is offset by having a bit more time up your sleeve during the off-season,” said Mark, who when he gets a chance to unwind  with family and friends likes to go where the fish are biting.

“I’ve always had a racing interest and owned horses, so that’s always provided a good outlet.

“About the only thing I can say about my fishing since I’ve been here is that I certainly know what a blowie looks like.”

No matter what the win/loss ratio is, Mark focuses on remaining positive.

“In my mind I try and not get frustrated or concerned about certain things,” he said.

“You have to think about the next week, what’s ahead and what you can do to make everyone better.”

Despite that display in the change rooms at the Gabba, there’s no chance of Mark “kicking the cat” when the working day ends.

“I try to be as upbeat as I can at home,” he said.

“There is no point to me coming home down in the doldrums because the family hears everything that is said about you and the footy club.”

“It is only a game. Unfortunately, too many people make it (losing) out to be to be a tragedy. It’s not. It’s just the competitive nature of the game.

“But having said that what burns inside me is the desire to win and to take the Fremantle Football Club to where it’s never been before.”

When the triple-premiership player fixes you with his piercing blue eyes to make the point, you know he means business.