There’s a certain magic to the air at six o’clock on a Saturday morning, before the sun has had a real chance to burn off the dew. It’s the smell of freshly cut grass on a footy oval, the sharp, clean scent of chlorine from a swimming pool, the rhythmic thud of a basketball on cold asphalt. If you really want to understand the heart and soul of coaching in this country, you don’t find it in a textbook or a fancy certification course. You find it here, in the cold, dark, and often beautiful moments before the rest of the world has even thought about its first cup of coffee.

When I first started out, a lifetime ago, it was all about the bark. We were a generation of coaches who believed that the only way to build a champion was to break them down first. We would scream and we would shout, we would run them until they spewed their guts out behind the bleachers. We thought that’s how you made them tough. And yeah, you get tough kids that way. But you also get broken ones. We have learned, slowly, and thankfully, that the game has changed. It's more professional now, more intelligent. The young coaches coming through today have access to a level of knowledge we could only dream of, a real science to the craft laid out by the national body. You can see the whole modern philosophy at Sportcoaching Australia; it’s a different world. It’s not just about the body anymore; it's about the head.

But some things, some of the really important things, they don’t change. The core of it, the fair dinkum, beating heart of Aussie coaching, is about two simple, and deeply profound, things: mateship and having a red-hot crack. It’s about teaching a kid that the person standing next to them in the jersey is their brother, their sister, and that you never, ever let your mate down. It’s about teaching them to never give up, to always have a go, even when you’re getting absolutely hammered and the scoreboard is a horror show.

Your real job isn’t just to teach a kid how to kick a ball or how to swim a lap. Any idiot can do that. Your real job is to be a mentor. You’re their psychologist when they are crippled by self-doubt before a big game. You’re their father or their mother figure when things are tough at home. You’re the one who sees that tiny, flickering spark of potential in them that they, and often the rest of the world, cannot see in themselves. And your job is to protect that flicker, to nurture it, and to fan it, gently, into a flame.

It’s a brutal job. It’s often thankless. It’s a thousand hours of standing in the pouring rain. But then, every once in a while, you have that one, perfect moment. That moment when a kid you have worked with for years, a kid who was once shy, and scared, and full of doubt, finally gets their moment of glory. And the look in their eyes in that single, beautiful, and fleeting moment… that’s the payoff. That’s why you get up at five o’clock in the morning. That’s what it’s really all about.