RISE OF SAM TALL STORY
Soccer’s loss footy’s gain
WHO is this tall kid called Sam Draper?
It is a question asked consistently in football circles since a 203cm, 17-year-old from the south of Adelaide switched from soccer to footy.
Born in South Australia, Draper, now 21, spent six years of his childhood living in Brede, an English village of about 1700 people, in East Sussex, near Hastings.
He started playing soccer there, first as a goalkeeper, before venturing further out into the field — becoming a towering centre back — when he returned to Adelaide and played for the SA Panthers’ under-18 and reserves sides. But after years of watching his friends, and brother Glenn, play footy, he ventured out to local club the Reynella Wineflies.
“He picked it up really quickly,” Reynella president Dave Denyer said.
Three trial games and two months later, talk of Draper’s size and raw talent made its way to then South Adelaide under-18 coach — now state mentor — Tony Bamford.
“I remember having a conversation with the coach at Reynella and they were pumping up his tyres a fair bit and I asked some of the kids at South, ‘Who was this tall kid at their school called Sam Draper?’ ” Bamford said.
“And they said, ‘Yeah, Sam is a really good soccer player, he’s thinking about playing footy’, so I said, ‘Well, get him out and let’s see what happens’.
“Funnily enough, his first training session he rocks up to is our team photo night.
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is a bit awkward, here’s a kid that has come out to his first training session and we’ve got the team photo’, but he just jumped straight into the back and centre of our team photo.”
Standing 2m tall as a teenager, Draper stood out on the footy field — but began to get noticed for how he played.
“He fitted in pretty quickly in terms of his skill acquisition, he could move, his footwork was good for a tall,” Bamford said. “We put him at centre half-back for the first couple of games. Eventually he worked his way into the ruck and he got in the state academy that year.”
An hour after ringing Bamford before the 2016 rookie draft, Essendon picked up Draper with the club’s first pick.
But the rise of Sam Draper didn’t stop there.
Despite being yet to play an AFL game for the Bombers, St Kilda was prepared to offer him a four-year, $1.7 million mega deal last year to solve its ruck crisis.
Not even a torn anterior cruciate ligament in May last year scared off the Saints, but Draper, who has good footwork and endurance, turned down the offer to stay at the Bombers.