Fox and hound – the life of a recruiter

The lone figure sat about 20 metres behind the goals, a folder on his lap, a pen in his right hand and binoculars trained on the play.

A passer-by on the concourse of Etihad Stadium gained the recruiter’s attention by calling his name.

John Beveridge turned to acknowledge the greeting but quickly put his focus back on the game, the 2012 TAC Cup grand final. He was on the job for St Kilda, as he had been for decades, watching the Oakleigh Chargers and Gippsland Power.

“I always liked to sit by myself,” Beveridge reflected. “It made me concentrate. If I’d sat with others maybe I would have felt the need to talk, to make some conversation.”

It was customary for him to take a position behind the goals.

He preferred to watch the game “up and down”.

“It gave me a perspective that I liked, rightly or wrongly,” he said. “I might have missed a bit. Some guys like to watch it from the middle. Whatever suits you.”

As for the binoculars, he never left home without them. Years ago when Beveridge unveiled a khaki pair Danny Frawley called him “The Desert Fox”.

The Chargers won that 2012 grand final with an extra-time point kicked by Jackson Macrae. Jack Billings booted two goals for the Oakleigh side, and 12 months later the Saints drafted him. Beveridge was by then in a part-time capacity with St Kilda, leaving Tony Elshaug to call Billings at No. 3.

He’s a “consultant” now, but for many years he was the Saints’ chief scout, an astute assessor of football talent who made his signings and then a lot of his draft selections when recruiters relied on their networks (Beveridge had nurtured a strong team of part-timers) and ultimately their eye. Technology came along but he remained a pen-and-paper man. His mind was his computer, storing away players’ backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses, any bits of information that were relevant to whether St Kilda should acquire them.

His memory remains as sharp as a pin. As he sipped coffee at a café near his Bentleigh home and talked to Inside Football, he effortlessly recited his selections in his first draft as recruiting manager, 1994: Joel Smith, Tony Brown, Aussie Jones and Steven Sziller. Highlights from the next years followed: Barry Hall at No.19 in 1995; Max Hudghton at 15, Jason Heatley at 49 and Andrew Thompson at 62 in 1996; Lenny Hayes at No.11 in 1998; and Nick Riewoldt at 1 and Justin Koschitzke at 2 in 2000.

When admiration was expressed for his recall, he replied that he agonised over his selections and the names and numbers were lodged in his brain.

“I’d have my boards at the club and I’d even take them home and go through them,” he said.

Riewoldt, Koschitzke, Hayes, Luke Ball, Nick Dal Santo, Xavier Clarke, Leigh Montagna, Steve Milne, Brendon Goddard, Steven Baker, Sam Gilbert, David Armitage ... he steered all of them to the Saints.

Fellow scout Neville Stibbard says Beveridge built the teams that Ross Lyon took to three grand finals.

“He’s left a legacy at St Kilda that I don’t think will ever be surpassed in terms of the talent he brought through the door,” Stibbard said.

Over three decades Beveridge watched a lot football in a lot of places, once venturing to the Horsham district to take in a match between Laharum and Natimuk when he heard a rival club was interested in a ruckman.

A schoolteacher in the bayside area remarked last year that Beveridge never failed to ask, “Have you seen any players?” whenever they crossed paths. He was on a never-ending search for prospects.

But in his earliest years with the Saints he was on the lookout for kicks and handballs. Beveridge was a sales rep for Dunlop footwear when he started doing the St Kilda training notes for the Sun News-Pictorial in 1964. The following year he compiled the Saints’ statistics for Harry Beitzel’s new publication Footy Week.

“It was an extra dollar,” he said, handy since he was newly married and not far from starting a family or coaching junior football at his local club, St Peters.

Beveridge would give Saints coach Allan Jeans copies of the stats. That led to a role with the club and a lasting friendship with Jeans. His move into recruiting came when St Kilda general manager Ian Drake offered him the full-time position of club development officer in 1983.

“Ian was a great visionary and he decided he wanted to have a recruiter in each of the regions, Frankston, Ballarat and metro,” Beveridge said.

“I said to my wife (Rosa), ‘Look, it might last three or four years, I’d like to give it a go.’ And there it was. The job lasted 30-odd years.”

Beveridge assembled Under 15 and 17 squads, feeding into the Under 19s. Future greats Nathan Burke, Robert Harvey, Stewart Loewe and Peter Everitt came out of the Saints zone under his watch. After the Under 19s competition and the zoning system finished at the end of 1991, Beveridge did some “looking and referring” for two years before succeeding Wayne Hughes as national recruiting manager.

Joel Smith was his first selection. He played 58 games for St Kilda and 163 more at Hawthorn. Beveridge believes Smith would have greatly influenced the 1997 Grand Final and possibly helped the Saints get over Adelaide had he not missed it with a knee injury.

“He came as a result of Tony Lockett going to Sydney and we copped Pick 5. Joel was beautifully balanced. We watched the Murray Bushrangers a lot that year,” he says. “Mind you, there wasn’t a lot of vision in those days, certainly not like what’s available now. If you wanted to do a highlights package of a player to show the coach you had to fiddle around with a VHS tape. It was a nightmare. You had to do it yourself or get someone outside the club to do it. You didn’t have IT people. “

What did he look for in a player?

A few things, and nothing out of the ordinary: athleticism, kicking skills, speed, endurance. And, having identified ability, he tried to predict how a player could refine it in a full-time training environment.

“You’re looking at kids who are going to be fitter and stronger in three years,” Beveridge said.

“I don’t know whether this is 100 per cent right, but when Chris Grant went to the Bulldogs he was about 6’1, and he grew to 6’4 or 6’5.

“Players do change. Cameron Ling carried a bit and played at full forward (for the Geelong Falcons). Patrick Dangerfield played a bit of full forward in his last year. Same as Nat Fyfe in Colts. He kicked eight one day and you knew he was a beautiful mark but you didn’t see him play midfield.

“Sam Fisher shouldn’t have lasted to 55. He played well early in that year for West Adelaide, took a lot of marks. But he did his shoulder and missed a few weeks. When he came back he was a decoy forward. But I had a chat to Shaun Rehn and he gave me a good heads-up on him, said he had a good tank. But I’d never seen him play in defence...”

Beveridge admitted it took him a while to “appreciate the bloke who was a touch slow but who knew what he was doing and would get it 35 times”.

He was always on the lookout for breakaway pace. “The Lewis Jettas of this world are needed because you can’t have all the blokes digging the trenches. You’ve got to have someone to carry it. You need one or two or more of them in your side. Jack Steven at the Saints has got a bit of both.”

Pick the best player or pick for the need?

“If it’s pretty even between the best player available and the need, and say you’re after a tall rather than a midfielder, you’d go for the tall. But if the midfielder is clearly the best player, you go for the midfielder, because you can’t have too many of them.”

He said character and a “desire to play” were important too.

“The difficult thing is to assess whether they’re going to put their nose to the wheel and do the work. A lot of kids get drafted and it’s a bit of a honeymoon, and a lot of them stay on the honeymoon for the rest of their careers and wonder why they didn’t make the grade.”

Thinking it was time for someone younger to take over, Beveridge’s stepped aside as recruiting manager in 2006, by which time the recruiting game had become far more sophisticated.

A battery of tests at camps and screenings, slabs of statistics and increased resources (clubs have a recruiting manager, list manager, four or five full-time recruiters, a few part-timers and a “pro scout”, whose job is identify trade and free agency possibilities) mean fewer surprises than in the early days of the draft.

Beveridge acknowledged the era of “smokies” had probably gone, though he suspects Melbourne got a roughie when it plucked Jayden Hunt out of Brighton Grammar in 2013. The Saints took a player from suburban-football obscurity in 2004, claiming James Gwilt from Noble Park with Pick 63. An old Eastern league recruiting contact phoned Beveridge and said Gwilt was “worth a follow”. Another connection kicked in for the veteran recruiter: Noble was coached by Denis Knight, who had played in a St Peters junior team under Beveridge.

“We went and watched him in a grand final,” Beveridge says. “He was a little bit easy come, easy go. But he was a beautiful left foot kick and strongly built. We visited the family and I told him he had to register as a rookie. He said he already had—and I knew ‘Hughesy’ (Hughes, then working at Carlton but a Noble Park follower) would have organised it. So we decided to take him with our last pick in the national because Carlton was ahead of us in the rookie (draft).”

Beveridge noted that Gwilt was in St Kilda’s best players in both 2010 grand finals.

Late picks Fisher (two best and fairests, 216 games and counting) and Thompson (221 games after being taken from Old Melburnians) and Milne (275 games and 574 goals after being raised from the rookie list) are other selections that brought him satisfaction.

And he was a little bit chuffed when his son, Luke, now coach of the Western Bulldogs, went to the Saints as a trade in 1995.

Luke finished with 118 games at three AFL clubs, following his grandfather, Jack Beveridge (a four-time premiership player at Collingwood), into league football.

“I think he makes people feel important, has a good way with people,” John Beveridge said.

The same can be said of the veteran recruiter.

“He’s the gentleman of gentlemen, John Beveridge,” Stibbard said.

“Can’t speak highly enough of him and what he’s done for the Saints and for the game. Has to be regarded as one of the best recruiters we’ve seen, no doubt. He didn’t have the resources of the powerful clubs but he was able to rate them all over Australia.

“Incredible eye, John.”

John Beveridge talks...

What ifs: “There have been a few. Simon Black is probably the main one. He was Pick 31 in 1997. I saw him kick seven in a trial game in WA. But I was like a lot of people, thought he was a bit slow. I can’t say I was that close to drafting him, because I wasn’t.”

On coaches: “Without being disrespectful coaches get too much praise for recruiting and the rebuilding process. The recruiters are the people who see the kids and make the assessments. Coaches come into it when players are out of contract and that, but the kids and the early picks, that’s for the recruiter to decide.”

Lenny Hayes: “Got him at 11. We thought Sydney might have taken him because he was a Sydney boy. But they were keen on the South Australians, Ryan Fitzgerald and Nic Fosdike, and they took Jude Bolton at 8. If they’d taken Lenny at 8, we would have taken Jude Bolton at 11 because the family were all St Kilda supporters.”