Werribee’s senior coach John Lamont couldn’t help but savour the romance of the situation.
When he took the reins of the Tigers at the start of 2014, he was doing so at the club where he played in a premiership in 1993 – Werribee’s only VFL flag.
Since that time, Lamont has spent more than 20 years in coaching, starting out as captain-coach of Ringwood in the Eastern Football League, before stints in the TAC Cup with the Oakleigh Chargers (five years) and Eastern Ranges (four).
From 2007, he worked as a development coach with North Melbourne in the AFL, dealing directly with Werribee and North Ballarat, the two Peter Jackson VFL clubs currently aligned with the Kangaroos.
So when Scott West stepped aside as Werribee’s senior coach at the end of the 2013 season, Lamont was perfectly placed to fill the void.
“For me anyway, it had a real feel-good feeling to it,” he said.
“I’d been back to the club in my role at North Melbourne, so I’d seen the club evolve and move along (since the 1993 premiership) but to then come back and coach, there’s certainly a bit of romance about it.”
More fond memories have been made in Lamont’s first year and a half back at the Tigers, as he hopes to continue the club’s run of recent finals appearances.
Werribee’s 10-8 record after the 2014 home-and-away rounds led to an elimination final victory over North Ballarat before Williamstown ended the new coach’s maiden year in charge with a semi-final defeat of the Tigers.
In 2015, his group has overcome the off-season loss of a wealth of experience to produce a 7-5 record, including impressive wins over Port Melbourne, Box Hill and Williamstown.
Drawing on his time in the TAC Cup, Lamont’s philosophy for coaching a successful VFL team is to simply “keep it real”.
“At the end of the day, most of these blokes started footy to have some fun and play with their mates – there’s not a whole lot different in the TAC Cup,” he said.
“Coaching U18 footy, kids had Year 12, school football and a whole range of other expectations; at Werribee, blokes have girlfriends, partners, they’re working full-time.
“We look for high performance within their footy, but that needs to fit around their family life, their work life, those sorts of things – we need to get that balance right.
“Footy’s just one part of the patchwork quilt of their lives, so we need to keep it real.”
But at Werribee, it’s not just the semi-professional VFL-listed players who need to be accommodated for.
Drawing on a different experience from his coaching past – at North Melbourne – Lamont faces the additional challenge of getting the best out of the Kangaroos who can come in and go out of Werribee’s side on a weekly basis.
“If you get omitted from an AFL team, you have to go through a bit of a rebuild to get yourself back in there,” he said.
“We have to make sure we’ve got the right environment here so that an AFL player comes back in, feels comfortable and has a chance to play his best footy to get himself back in the senior team.”
The dynamic of the juggling act involving part-time and full-time footballers at Avalon Airport Oval will change further in 2016, when North Melbourne ends its partial alignment with North Ballarat and enters a full alignment with the Tigers.
Read Lamont's comments on the decision and how it will impact Werribee in the AFL Victoria Record this weekend.
Last Modified on 16/07/2015 23:03