“For many years, we dared to dream about being a serious footy club. We’ve managed to gain a different type of respect – the worthiness of being a ‘proper club’ our juniors can aspire to play senior footy for.
“We’re no longer a Div 4 team. We’re a C-Grade team looking to dream even higher.”
It’s fair to say the Parkside Devils have ridden the VAFA rollercoaster from top to bottom over the years, rising all the way to A-Grade in 1989 (after winning the 1988 B-Grade flag), before finding themselves in Division 4 upon their return to the VAFA in 2015.
After a couple of brief Division 3 flirtations, the Devils had slid back to Div 4 (after winning just two games to finish 12th) when Robbie Wise first approached good friend Rick Frost to take on the senior coaching job for 2017.
Frost had been a talented junior player, playing a Reserves game for Carlton in 1998 while winning the Northern Knights Best & Fairest and finding his way onto Melbourne’s supplementary list before heading to Perth to play at South Fremantle. A few knee injuries later, he returned home to play locally with Montmorency.
“When Robbie first asked me about coaching Parkside, my first question was: ‘What’s your junior program like?” Frost recalls.
“And the reality was that while we there were lots of juniors around the club, we weren’t seen as an attractive destination. Being a Division 4 team, we’d lose so much talent to other clubs as the kids wanted to play at a higher level.”
Rick coached the Devils for two seasons in 2017 and 2018 (making a Grand Final) before heading overseas to study Human Rights in Italy. A teacher by trade, he returned to Melbourne just before COVID struck.
At that time, Wise, who was coaching Parkside, once again found himself swamped by other commitments. So, guess who he called?
“I’d enjoyed coaching,” Frost smiles. “I’d been lucky to have been influenced by some great people during my playing days – guys like Chris Fagan at Melbourne and John Northey at South Fremantle, who both had a great way with people. So, I decided to give it another go.”
Frost knew that for the Devils to start rising through the ranks, they had to find a way to keep their best young talent by continuing to build the bridge between their junior and senior programs.
“It’s got to be a cultural focus, it really does,” he says.
“We’re 100% about inclusion. We include as many people as we can. To be a better club, we need to be a bigger club.
“We’ve got a feeder team, three senior men’s teams and a women’s team. Our juniors train with our seniors, which is uncommon. We want to make sure we develop our kids to be the best people they can be. Resilience, courage, authenticity.
“We have five senior players coaching junior teams at our club. To have players giving back like that is amazing. It creates a continual cycle of connection and improvement.
“When the senior men’s program embraces the women’s and junior programs, you can create the strong ethical community we want our club to stand for.
“And ‘community’ is the perfect word for it. We are blessed to have really good people around the club. A family like the Romano’s – Anthony is the President, Vinny coached here for a long time and Mick is the current captain. Characters like them kept the club together when things weren’t going so well.”
When Rick re-took the reins for season 2023, he and the club had audacious goals.
“We wanted to climb up to C-Grade. It was our first big long-term goal. And it was going to be driven by culture.”
Premier footy looked a long way away, but the journey had already begun, with Parkside (under Wise) making the 2022 Division 3 Grand Final from fourth spot, ultimately falling two goals short of South Melbourne Districts.
That elevated the Devils to Division 2, and it proved to be a one-season whistle-stop as Parkside achieved double promotion. They went 17-3 to win the minor premiership by two games and the flag in a 3-point thriller over Old Yarra Cobras.
“The ten years we’ve invested in building our alignment with our junior club is paying off,” says Rick.
“We entered 2024 with a focus of boosting our talented young crop. We know that can’t be fast-tracked. You have to put the basics in place first. We have good kids with leadership qualities, so first and foremost, we wanted to build on the growth of 2023 and that started with being competitive.”
After losing their opening game to UHS-VU by a kick, the Devils peeled off 7 straight wins to stamp themselves as a team to watch. But three straight losses (all by less than 3 goals) brought the new kids on the Division 2 block back down to Earth.
“We had a theme – being able to do the UNCOMMON. And for us, that meant moving beyond what the norm may be. Raise our standards higher than what would be commonly expected, with no benchmark on our capacity. And once we got beyond that ‘common’ standard, we were able to start doing some uncommon things.
“The players embraced the concept and we married it up with different themes for the four-week blocks. One was based around individual improvement, we took inspiration from the Tour de France at one point.
“Our kids started to believe in different ways. They could apply this thinking to their lives and careers as well. If enough individuals raised their performance by 20%, well that’s where games are won. Belief and cohesion come from that.”
Despite the three consecutive losses, the Devils were still in decent shape at 7-4.
“We broke our season into four-week blocks, and we looked at the blocks still to come and realised that finals were in the mix. We place a big emphasis on character – who we are and who we’re becoming. We learned that if we develop our character and bring our best, we can do the uncommon. That’s the outcome of the right words and the right actions.”
Parkside steadied superbly to win 6 of their last 7 games and finish the home & away season in second position, 3 games behind Prahran, who they’d beaten by 27 points in Round 3 before falling to them by 17 points in Round 11.
But the Two Blues went to another level on Second Semi Final day, belting the Devils by 60 points – clearly their biggest loss of the season (which was previously that 17-point loss in Round 11).
Suddenly, a season of such promise sat on the precipice of a straight sets September departure. Could Parkside dust themselves off and get past UHS-VU, who had beaten them twice throughout the season?
“Since Div 4 to where we are now, we’ve had to draw upon the belief that we’re good enough to do something beyond the norm,” says Rick. “It was never going to be a linear path.”
“We had to dig deep after being thumped. But our players are young and ambitious, with no fear of what’s happened before.”
And dig deep the Devils did, exploding to life with a scintillating opening quarter based around centre-clearance domination.
“That first quarter was some of the best footy I’ve played against,” said UHS-VU skipper Harrison Kennedy post-game. “Their leg speed and the way they moved the ball early was phenomenal.”
UHS-VU battled on bravely, surging late to get within a kick but Parkside managed to hang on for a hard-fought 7-point win that set up a Grand Final rematch against Prahran.
“That was an awesome first half,” Rick recalls.
“We were able to contain the game a bit from there and we ran out of legs late, but we always have a really big crowd of juniors and parents. And to see a lot of red and white in the crowd is worth a couple of goals and we managed to hold on.”
The next mental challenge was the might of the Two Blues just a fortnight after being dismantled in the Second Semi.
“Prahran thumped us in that Semi Final. We went back to character, and for us it was about resilience.”
And resilience was certainly required from both teams in what turned out to be a brutal day of wintry weather punctuated by rain and hail at Hadfield. Prahran were quicker to settle into the conditions, booting the only three goals of the first half to lead by 16 points at the major break.
But the Devils refused to yield, preventing the Two Blues from careering away as they’d done so many times in 2024. Parkside halved the deficit to just 8 points at the last change, before 20 tense minutes of high-pressure footy was finally broken by a Prahran goal.
Mitch Lawson responded two minutes later to keep Parkside’s dream alive before the Two Blues sealed with it a goal at the 27-minute mark.
Rick couldn’t have been prouder.
“For our players to have that level of belief to rebound like that in two weeks was just awesome,” he reflects.
“To lose by a couple of goals was unbelievable. Growing your personal capacity is how you make finals. That atmosphere of moving past an old barrier into a new development phase is unreal.
“Kids coming into our senior program at just 16 or 17 years old and being embraced by our young leaders aged 23 or 24 helps them pass through their threshold quicker because of that encouragement. The belief they instil in each other gives me the biggest buzz.
“Our juniors will come on quicker, and we’ll attract the right players if they’re feeling embraced. That’s the highlight for me, not making the Grand Final. It was a beautiful thing to see our players really go for it.”
And so, after three consecutive promotions (from Div 3 to Div 2 to Div 1), they have realised their long-term goal of playing Premier footy as they set themselves for a crack at Premier C in 2025.
“A couple of opposition coaches have already told me, ‘This is where the real footy starts.’
“We know there are more competitive clubs and our opposition will have good structures and more individual brilliance. For us, it comes down to personal development and confidence. Bringing a great attitude.
“We’re all involved in footy for such a short time – the players know this. Uncommon is all we can do. We’ll define it weekly and we’ll demand they give all that they can give. The players have certainly put in throughout the pre-season.
“We’ve spent time working on what our game looks like in different scenarios and how we structure up. We want to be calculated before being daring.
“We’re well balanced and we can do something special. Being young and carefree has its merits. Riley Williams, who won our Best & Fairest last season, is 28. Our next oldest would be our captain, Michael Romano, who is 24.
“We lost Benedict and Dom Douglas, but we’ve picked up ruck Josh Moylan, who joins his brothers Lachie and Nick at the club. We also have some juniors coming through with untapped potential.
“We’ve created space for the community to come in and our community is so supportive. We had people come down from Queensland for our Grand Final. We’d love to see as many Parkside faces as possible every week. We’re all invested in the outcome together.
“For many years, we dared to dream about being a serious footy club. We’ve managed to gain a different type of respect – the worthiness of being a ‘proper club’ our juniors can aspire to play senior footy for.
“We’re no longer a Div 4 team. We’re a C-Grade team looking to dream even higher.”
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