DEVILS’ ADVOCATE
ANOTHER SEASON FROM HELL, BUT …
IT’S five o’clock and a bitterly cold 6C.
An icy breeze sweeps across Viva Energy Oval as a sprinkling of pint-sized juniors brave the elements.
Pacing the outside perimeter of the ground — almost an hour before his senior players are due to arrive for training — is Darren Bennett.
Alongside him is a friend in need.
This ain’t about brownie points for the Corio senior coach. Quite the opposite.
For Bennett, he’s there as motivation for a loyal club member on his weight-loss journey.
While Bennett seemingly has all the problems in the world with the winless Devils, the compassionate coach is pouring his energy into assisting others, walking laps with this member well before the players start showing up.
He wants to make a difference on and off the field.
“It’s pretty tough at times,” Bennett said of life as coach of the worst-performed side in the region.
“It’s been a tough road, but I knew that coming into the job. But instead of sitting at home worrying about the club’s future, I thought I’d get my hands dirty and fix the place.”
A mentor at the Devils in 2014 when he shared the role with club great Barry O’Toole, Bennett has returned to dig his childhood club out of a rut.
Having endured back-toback winless seasons (they last won a match in 2017) and a 24-149-1 win-loss-draw ratio since 2010, Corio hit its lowest ebb last Saturday when it failed to score against unbeaten ladder-leader Thomson, which booted 33.29 (227).
But Bennett has never questioned — not even for a second — his decision to get back in the fold.
“I’ve always been a Corio person, my family is from Corio, and even when I wasn’t around I was still trying to help out with things,” said Bennett, a former assistant coach at Geelong West in the GFL.
“When West had a week off I’d come and watch Corio. I knew where they were at and I just wanted to help.”
From the outside looking in, Corio appears in desperate trouble. The club has had five presidents in as many years, endured multiple coaching changes and countless thrashings at both senior and reserves level.
The numbers in the junior ranks are thin, with the club’s senior netball teams leading the way in terms of competitiveness.
While acknowledging the plight of the football grades, Bennett insists the situation is far from dire. “We’ll stay afloat,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that dire, we’ve got good numbers. We haven’t got the results on the field, but off the field we’re doing well.
“Socially, it’s a good place to be and the guys are still coming to training and giving effort.
“You can look at the quality that we’ve got and the side that Thomson had at the weekend, and if our boys weren’t trying, we would’ve lost by 400 points.
“Even against Inverleigh, they kicked 11 goals in the first quarter and we laid 26 tackles, so our efforts there every week.
“It’s just hard for the boys to keep rocking up when they get pumped every week.
“A few of the guys have taken a break here or there just to freshen up because it is really challenging on the minds of some of the younger guys.”
Committing long-term to the club, joining president Greg Ince and vice-president Nadine Scoble in pledging their allegiance to the Devils, Bennett is clear in the direction the club needs to take.
“We just need a real player buy-in,” Bennett said.
“We’ve gone over a few things in the last couple of weeks that we’re doing wrong culturally.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who don’t do the right things and we’re trying to move past those guys now.
“There’s guys who just want to turn up on Saturday and play, but for the club to go forward, we need to move on from these players.
“In the position we’re in, we can’t take a broom and sweep everyone, but there’s some that have done it year after year and they get a new coach every year and they get a clean slate.
“Some of these guys have been doing the wrong thing and getting away with it for five years in a row and at some point you have to put a wall up and stop it from happening.
“It’s a flow-on effect, the player’s say, ‘If he’s not doing it, why should I?’ So we need to stand up and change that.
“We need to say, ‘ Where were you on Tuesday night? Why didn’t you ring?’. We need to change our culture.”
Slowly but surely the wheel is turning, according to Bennett, who revealed the player leadership group had taken ownership and was driving the standards.
Bennett has also taken the drastic step of changing locker room policy in a bid to unite the club.
“A lot of the guys don’t shower at the club after the game,” Bennett said.
“They go in the changerooms, they grab their bag and they go home and have a shower. That, on the outside, looks really bad to other clubs because they’re not coming into the clubrooms, they’re going straight home.
“They’re not being disrespectful, they just want to go home and have a shower. That’s just a culture thing.
“When I played footy, everyone had a shower here, so that’s something we’re going to change.
“The guys are going to bring a towel, they’re going to shower here and come into the rooms.
“It’s easy to go home and have a nice warm shower at home, but we need to show other clubs respect.
“Against Thomson we had a few boys going into the club, so it’s starting to turn already.”
Starting from a long way back, Bennett concedes his side will most likely complete the 2019 season without a win.
And it’s difficult to forecast when that breakthrough victory might come.
“That depends on who we get in and what we’ve got available, there’s a lot of variables,” Bennett said.
“I loved to say we’ll win games next year, but we don’t know what’s to come. It’s a big challenge to come to a club like Corio.
“It takes big character to come into a side that’s struggling. I’ve got to make it attractive for guys who want to come here.
“There’s a stigma with Corio and I’ve been on the outside and I know how we’re judged, but I’ve just got to make it a place where people want to be.”
Asked if prospective recruits simply ignore his offer to play with the Devils based on performances, Bennett quipped “Yep”.
“And that’s why some guys want to leave because they get beaten every week,” he said.
“There’s guys who get to the end of the season and they say, ‘I’ve been asked to go to another club and I’ve had a think about it and I just wouldn’t mind winning a couple of games’.
“I actually feel sorry for them. I just hope that everyone sticks around. I’ve got good respect from the playing group and I care about them on the field as well as off the field.”
With player retention an issue, Bennett declared 90 per cent of the senior playing group had recommitted for next year in a positive step for the club.
Blake Hutchinson is eager to play on in 2020, while young gun Liam Duffy will sign a oneyear contract. Simon Seddon is weighing up his future.
“I need people to commit because I speak to the players and they say, ‘Who’s staying and who’s going?’ That’s what happens year after year,” Bennett said.
“You get three or four in, but you lose three or four and it doesn’t help. The points system is a bit of a worry as well.
“We’ve got 47, which is as high as anyone can have, but is a four-pointer and a threepointer going to get me any closer to Thomson?
“So we need to address that. We’re fine financially, so I’m not asking the league for help in that regard, but lifting the lid on the points would help a bit.”
A 341-game veteran, multiple reserves premiership captain and junior premiership coach, Bennett is desperate to wind the clock back to the halcyon days and provide his players an environment in which to thrive.
“I want to give them what the club gave me,” Bennett said. “I had happy days, my kids grew up here and we spent every Saturday night here.
“I used to come to training on Tuesday and Thursday night and see my mates, I played with my best mates every Saturday and I want that for these boys.
“I want it to be a place for them to learn and grow. You don’t play football forever, and when I look back now, I treasure my days here.”
WHEN Greg Ince stood down as president at the end of the 2013 season due to personal reasons, Corio was in a healthy state.
The club was sound financially and the senior football side was fighting, winning four matches and finishing 10th in an ultra-competitive season.
What followed was five seasons of hell for the Devils.
They would win just two
games the following season, go winless in 2015 and claim just five victories in the next four years.
Worse still, it was a revolving door of presidents and coaches, with the club basically rudderless and close to shutting the doors forever.
“When I left in 2013, everything was going really well,” Ince stressed.
“I came back this year and we’ve got virtually no juniors — we still have under-10s, under-13s and our Auskick in place — but no under-15s, under-17s or under-19s.
“That makes it hard on the club because we’ve got no flow of kids coming through.
“We had an under-19s side who were runners-up in Division 3 last year and most of those kids haven’t played this season.”
While Corio is not alone in its fight to recruit and retain junior players in the region’s north, the geographic location and the socio-economic status of the Purnell Road-based club is having a crippling effect.
“I went to a meeting with all the other (northern suburbs) clubs and it’s a problem across the board,” Ince said.
“It hasn’t helped that a couple of schools have closed down out here. We used to tap into a lot of those schools for juniors.
“We’re working in with a lot of the schools now, but a lot of the children in this area now are from other nationalities and they’re getting a lot of pressure to play soccer and other sports.
“So we’re trying, and we’re working with AFL Barwon to come up with some solutions to try and get some juniors back.
“I think we’ll start back at Auskick and work our way back from there. We’re hopeful of having stand-alone teams, if not, we’ll look at combining with other clubs to form junior teams.
“They don’t have to play under ‘Corio’, they can play for the Northern Suburbs or whatever it may be, but we just want kids on the park.
“We don’t want them sitting around doing nothing. That’s the problem.”
Instead of sitting on his hands, Ince has rolled up his sleeves in an attempt to save Corio from further turmoil.
“I’m in it for the long haul,” he said. “I thought it was time to get back into it. I came down to a few games and all the old spectators are gone and when you’re losing, you lose everything.
“When you’re winning, hopefully you win them all back.
“Off-field, we’re tremendous. We’ve got a lot of money in the bank and the people behind the scenes have done a great job. All we need is to build on the senior footy because it will flow on from there.
“The netballers are doing a great job, they’re fifth at the moment in A Grade and they played finals last year, so we’re doing well.
“We’re getting people to the club and a lot of them are new faces, which is the best thing.
“Our relationship with other clubs is good, too. The old days of ‘ Corio’s a bunch of thugs’ is gone. We’re here now to play footy.”
Ince admits he’s a glutton for punishment, but could no longer worry about the club’s future.
“The easy way would be to sit over the fence and have a look at the boys get flogging after flogging, but I want to help,” Ince said.
“Personally, I love the people here. People say, ‘Why would you go to Corio? You must have rocks in your head’.
“But I just love it. It’s more of a challenge than most other clubs.”
IN three seasons of football, Nick Flaccavento has been lucky enough to belt out the theme song once.
He lost 17 of 18 games in 2017, all 18 last season and is winless through 12 games in 2019.
But the Devils skipper is sticking fat.
“I just want to hang around and help the club get better,” Flaccavento said at training.
“That’s the reason I came here. I’d rather come to a club and help them grow, start from the bottom and build your way up and be successful.
“It’s hard (losing every week), but you’ve just got to keep going.”