Georgie Parker: Coaching teams is a very difficult job, but the role the media plays in sport is vital

You could say it’s been a big week for Adam Simpson (and The West).

He ends his long tenure at the club, and with it comes a lot of mixed emotions. It seems most coaches end like that.

Much like players, coaches have highs and lows. The highs of grand finals and premierships, club progression and player achievements and the lows of wooden spoons, scandals and the eventual parting of ways. With Simpson leaving with an obvious sour taste in his mouth — not even coaching a final match for the Eagles — it makes you wonder why anyone would want to coach given how it ends for a majority of them. A club can be an incredible place full of happiness and excitement, when the team is winning that is. When they’re not it’s walking on egg shells for players and workers alike.

The difference walking in to a club when the men have lost as opposed to winning is stark, and that’s just for us outside of the coaching offices.

The pressure internally on coaches is enormous, and with contracts basically meaningless (Stewie Dew and Ben Rutten the perfect recent examples of this), you can’t help but think this must always be on the mind of coaches after each loss, compounding as losses start to stack on top of each other.

Unlike players who under their CBA would get a full payout, coaches only receive a portion. I can’t imagine signing a contract knowing if a coach with more runs on the board becomes available you may no longer have a job. Even just managing a list of so many people all striving to make the team is hard. You’re having to continually make tough calls and have hard conversations with young adults about why they aren’t good enough to be playing that week.

You can be instantly disliked by players for doing your job by either giving them a hard message, or simply someone else on the team is better at the game than them.

You can’t be in this job if you want to be liked, because it’s impossible to be liked by everyone when egos are at play.

Externally though, you have additional pressures you can’t even control. These are decided from just two hours seen once a week without any idea of what’s going on inside your four walls.

Fans can love you or loathe you. Ken Hinkley, just weeks ago was booed by his own fans when leaving the ground after a loss and Carlton fans were calling for the sacking of Michael Voss before he led them to a preliminary final in the same year. For some fans the club they follow is their everything, and can in turn become cruel if not winning, as can the media. The media can be awful (I understand the irony of writing this in the paper he called out). This isn’t The West’s fault though, nor was it Tom Morris’ fault when Luke Beveridge had a similar outburst at him in a post match press conference.

Newspapers and journalists are incredibly important to keep integrity and accountability of the game (we can’t have the only media in the game run by the league itself after all). They are absolutely necessary, and comes with the territory.

The build up of the news cycle, combined with poor results and continually hard conversations is the reason why when surveyed by the AFLCA on their well-being 42 per cent of AFL coaches were either average or below. Sport however, be it playing or coaching, is like a drug. The highs are so high, making you forget those lows that can be on the other side of it all.

So while right now the taste is an ugly one for Simpson, the longer he is away from the game and the club, I hope the less those down moments come to mind and the highs from the career of both playing and coaching are remembered, because he’s got more of them than most could dream of. So to all coaches, thank you for putting yourselves in the unenviable position of leading. You either have a passion I could never dream of, or be crazy. I’m sure some of you are both.