By John Harrington

Nicholas Walsh describes himself as “a pretty driven character”.

The career he’s carved out for himself in the Australian Football League as a coach with the Greater Western Sydney Giants is a testament to that personality trait.

The Giants are the AFL’s newest franchise. They played their first season in 2012, and Walsh was with them right from the start. 

How he engineered that opportunity for himself and had the self-belief to really go for it gives a revealing insight into that ‘driven’ aspect of his make-up.

The former Cavan footballer had a previous taste of life in the AFL when was signed as an International Rookie by Melbourne Demons in 2000 after captaining the Ireland U-17 team in their international series against Australia.

Three years of persistent injuries ended his dream of making it in the AFL as a player, and he so he returned home to Ireland and made his way onto the Cavan senior football team.

Off the pitch, his life seemed on a good trajectory when joined Croke Park as children’s games development officer after spending five years working for the Cavan County Board as their GAA development officer.

As much as he enjoyed those roles, Walsh still had unfinished business with Australian Rules Football and busied himself developing a skill-set and network of contacts that would ultimately earn him a route back there.

From 2004 to 2010 he travelled to Australia on six occasions on self-funded tours to different AFL clubs to see what their set-ups were like and network with those running them.

So when he heard that a new AFL franchise was going to be set-up, he was determined to get in on the ground-floor.

“I was quite lucky because a number of Melbourne Football club people who were at the club when I went there as a player in 2000 where involved as well with the set-up of the new franchise," says Walsh.

“When this club was set up I was speaking with a number of people and saying I'd love an opportunity. They basically said we may have a position here for you if you're interested. We just got talking like that so there was no real formal interview per se.

“I had a good chat with the club's High performance manager at the time, John Quinn, and he said there is a role there if you're willing to break your roots in Ireland and leave.

“I jumped at the chance and went out there and I guess it was through people and opportunity that something arose.”

It was the sort of opportunity he was hungering for, but it still counted as major leap of faith in his own ability.

Setting up a professional sports team from scratch to compete in an elite competition is a huge undertaking. So as their newly appointed strength and conditioning coach Walsh was really jumping straight into the deep end.

Not surprisingly, the new-born Giants took some time to find their feet in the AFL.

Their first match was a Syndey derby match against the Swans which they lost by 63 points. Over the of the season they set a new League record of losing five matches by more than 100 points, and managed to win just two.

They fared worse again in their second season, losing their first 17 matches and winning just one.

“Looking back on it, the first couple of years were tough,” admits Walsh. “You're only winning one out of 22 games and then two out of 22 games so we only won three games in the first two years.

“Some of those games we were beaten by 150 to 200 points, which were hard losses. What we were always told by (Head Coach) Kevin Sheedy was that you've got to keep selling the message.

“Even if it's a false message at times, just keep selling the message that we're going to be good, we're going to get better, but there has to be a lot of hard work in between.

“We went about developing our brand and the culture of the Giants. And then put systems in place that were focused on a games based approach and effectively transferring the talent that we had into hard work, effort and energy.

“From there we created a club, and now we're competing at the highest level.”

Slowly, that culture that Walsh and his colleagues worked hard to create began to take root. ‘There’s a giant in all of us’, became the club’s slogan, and eventually that giant stood tall.

They won six of their 22 regular season games in 2014, 11 in 2015, and last year their 16 victories got them into the finals series.

There they defeated their cross-town rivals the Swans by 36 points to qualify for the Preliminary Final against the Bulldogs, which is the AFL’s equivalent of an All-Ireland semi-final.

The Giants were narrowly beaten in a match they could easily have won, but despite the disappointment of that defeat Walsh takes a lot of satisfaction from the journey that transformed the new franchise from a laughing stock into one of the best teams in the League.

“Yeah, you appreciate it a bit more, I think,” he says. “Someone asked me would it have been easier to set up a new club or go into an already established club and what would I prefer.

“I'd give any day of the week to go into the structures I went into when there was basically nothing there and we built it from scratch.

“Like, Western Sydney is a very NRL Rugby League dominated area. And for the first six months we trained on a baseball ground because we didn't have an oval or a pitch to train on.

“It was cricket-season and all of the ovals were being used for cricket so we had to train on a small baseball diamond out in Western Sydney in Blacktown.

“It was quite challenging in its own way. We were doing our goal-kicking in the car-park, and that was Kevin Sheedy's philosophy. It sort of grew a steely culture within our club. That's the sort of culture that we're trying to push and promote right now as well to keep going forward.”

Walsh is one of the key drivers of that culture, and his influence in the club since jointing has been rewarded with promotion.

He went there as a strength and conditioning coach in the sports science department, then moved on to a role as a development coach in the club.

Last season he was given the opportunity to coach the first-team’s back line. He must have done a good job, because this year he will have responsibility for the team’s overall defensive plan.

The Giants have come a long way in five years, and so has Walsh.

"Yeah, it's paying off,” he says. “I'm loving my time in Sydney and I just signed a new two-year contract.

"You look back and you say it's gone quick, I'm going into my sixth year and stuff. But I want to keep pushing on and challenging myself and getting better because I find myself that if I wasn't doing something I was enjoying I'd get bored very quickly.

"I think the thing with the role I'm in now is that it's very challenging. Because the margins in games are very, very small and if we can tighten up our defence by two goals a game, we could potentially win a Premiership next year.

"Obviously we have a lot of work to do before we can start thinking about that in terms of playing each round as it comes. There's 22 games played before we even make the finals, so we've got to just set our stall out and take it one week at a time basically.

"Hopefully we'll get a bit of success along the way. It would be good to because there's a lot of hard work gone into the last number of years but it's a very tight margin in terms of winning and losing.

“It's like any sport, you can do your best and put in those best procedures and hopefully it will bring you success going forward.”

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