WIN A REWARD FOR CHANGES

A WIN on Wednesday was a weight off my shoulders, but there’s a long way to go.

We’ve only won one game, so we’re not getting carried away.

Drysdale could have won by four or five goals had they kicked straight, so we’re not getting too excited.

We’re definitely going to enjoy the win because they’re few and far between, but we’ve got to keep on track, keep our expectations realistic and keep our focus week on week.

But a number of changes in the off-season have improved our club. For starters, we just got a lot of good people into the club. We targeted good people with leadership and we brought in guys who had premiership success with other competitions and in other teams

We identified last year we were a pretty quiet bunch. No disrespect to the club or group, but we didn’t have a winning culture and not a lot of guys actually knew how to win games.

We’ve brought that winning culture into the group, which the guys have really embraced.

Last year was also my first season as a senior coach and I’ve taken a lot of learnings from a difficult 2017.

Last year I had Mark Tilders alongside me, who was my footy manager and helping out on the bench, and he did a fantastic job.

But we identified, especially with me being out on the ground, that we needed line coaches and a head coach on the bench who can make changes and calls as he sees the game go on.

Last year, I was trying to get a kick, trying to coach and trying to get my head around who can do what. It was all too much and my head was all over the place.

We gave Adrian Carr a role — he’s been around the area for 10 years now.

He was an assistant coach at Geelong West, and was a bit of a champion out Warragul way when he played.

He’s got a really good football brain so we got him on board to be a bench coach, as well as Jamie Morgan, who is out at the moment with a hip injury.

They’ve been fantastic in supporting me and I’ve got a lot of trust in them swinging changes as they see fit.

I’ve also been lucky enough to add Werribee VFL coach John Lamont as a mentor in the last month.

Not long ago he moved to Portarlington and has fallen in love with our club.

He’s come down to a training session and he’s invited me to sit in the box at a Sunday game for Werribee, and see how they train and how things are done at that level.

That’s sure to help my development as a coach invaluably.

The biggest thing is, we’ve now got more leaders and coaches, and the message is getting through.

We’re a lot more structured and that probably comes down to the message getting through a lot clearer.

The message may not have been coming through as clear as I wanted last year, me being a first-year coach and not knowing much about Portarlington.

I think second year around I’m a lot more comfortable in the role and the message is getting through a lot clearer.

Coaching has been more enjoyable because of it.

“We identified last year we were a pretty quiet bunch. No disrespect to the club or group, but we didn’t have a winning culture and not a lot of guys actually knew how to win games. We’ve brought that winning culture into the group, which the guys have really embraced.”