Sam Mitchell has shared a rare insight into his first season as an AFL head coach.

Mitchell opened up about the inner workings of being a coach at the highest level in a recent episode of the BackChat Sports Show.

In an insightful interview with host and former AFL player Will Schofield, the Hawthorn coach covered several topics on the podcast including how his passion for coaching started, his views on selection and how he went from becoming a player to a coach.

When his coaching journey started

 “I made my AFL debut in 2002 and the first coaches’ course I found was at the end of 2009, I was 26 at the time,” Mitchell explained.

“I had become the captain of the club and I was looking at leadership and how to improve my positive influence on others and really working on myself a lot.

“Once I had done all the education I could do, the next progression to try and increase my positive influence on others was around coaching.

“I dipped my toes in the water at the start and then I felt as though it made me a significantly better player.

“So now I get as many players in the coaching box that I can, and be as transparent as I can because they watch the game with new eyes and it actually makes them a better player.

“James Sicily is a good example, he spent almost a year in the coaches box last year and now he is playing at a different level.” 

The transition from player to coach

“I think I was 34 or 35 at the time, my days of being one of the ratbags in the locker room were mostly gone,” Mitchell laughed.  

“You get so many perks as a player – you live in this cocooned world – you have sponsors looking after you, your boots are cleaned for you, and you have people making sure you are where you need to be all the time.

“But I quickly learnt that being a coach is a very different world than being a player.”

Building player relationships

“There’s a great debate among coaching education about how your relationship with players should be like. Should you be their friend? Should you keep a bit of distance to keep it professional? There are certain perimeters you need to keep as a professional,” Mitchell said.

“I think you need to show some vulnerability, show who you are – you need players to know you’re not perfect and that you make plenty of mistakes.

“Players don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

“You have to get the players to understand you as a person and get to know who you are, what you are about and what your values are.

“Once they do that, then they’ll start to listen to you about any technical skills, tactics or scenarios.”

The coaching philosophy

 “From 2009 when I first started my coaching journey, you’re really developing a philosophy that whole time,” Mitchell said.

“For me, you’re always trying to get ahead of the game. At Hawthorn we have a young group – we played the youngest team on the weekend out of any team for the round – so if we try and play the way Melbourne and Geelong are playing, they’re going to be better than us at that.

“So, we need to figure out what the next generation of the game is and then play in that way so then in three years’ time, when everyone is trying to play this new style, we’ve already been playing it, we’ve learnt all of the mistakes.

“Some coaches try to emulate what the last successful era has done, but really the success comes from being able to think forward, and there is a riskiness about that.”

The game day experience

“You’d be surprised at how calm our coaches’ box is currently. I’ve had a couple of games where I have not coached very well when things haven’t moved smoothly,” Mitchell explained.

“I went and coached from the bench a few weeks back. Coaching from the bench is good because you’re with the players and you can give direct feedback. As soon as a player comes off you can look them straight in the eye and say ‘Make sure, you do this’.

“But you actually can’t see the game particularly well. What would take me to the bench is when it’s not a tactical game, but an effort game. Or if someone is involved in an incident, altercation or gets a big injury. They’re the things that take you to the bench. Because you’re trying to control morale more than tactics.”

How an AFL back office works

“Personally, as the coach, my match committees are usually brief,” Mitchell said.

“But post-game the agenda is a nightmare. You’ve got to do the coaches votes for the coaches’ association. And then you do offence, defence, stoppages, forwards, backs, mids, any scenarios you went into, GPS reporting, the VFL reserves report, rating of every player and their feedback.

“If you’re well prepared then your week can roll out quite smoothly, so we usually have quite lengthy meetings the first day or two and then it’s pretty smooth after that.”

Coaching his first year at Box Hill

“Coaching your own team was something that people always said you had to do, and I didn’t really believe that,” he said.

“I still think you can be a successful AFL head coach without doing that, but what it does is that it teaches you a lot about responsibilities.”

You can listen to the full episode of Mitchell on BackChat on YouTube or Spotify.