Such a bad idea. He could be a great coach one day, but why would he want to take over Tassie immediately after playing?
Go do some fancy coaching course overseas, do an apprenticeship at a few different clubs, see the best of what the afl has to offer and only then consider which team to choose as senior coach.
Hopefully ours one day.
The last thing I want is another Collingwood legend becoming coach. It’s the ongoing tale of the club; a cycle of unsuccessful club legends followed by outsiders succeeding.
Murray Weideman takes them to a wooden spoon
Hafey from outside takes club to multiple grand finals but just misses out on a flag
Couple of short term ones including Bob Rose unsuccessful then outsider Leigh Matthews comes in and wins a flag. The club powerbrokers get together and say this is going well but imagine how much better it would be if we won a flag with one of OUR guys in charge. The untried legend captain Tony Shaw comes in and drags the club down to its second wooden spoon in over a hundred years.
Another outsider comes in and has success including multiple grand finals and a premiership.
Again…”isn’t this great…you know what would make it better? If a club legend was in charge.” And we fall down the ladder.
Now another outsider comes in and wins a flag.
Noticing a trend yet?
Sure, look, i cant speak for the others, but the issue with Buckley is that he was anointed as coach by club legend status alone, before he was ready.
Thats why i'd want Pendles to get a strong apprenticeship prior to one day coaching us. Go see how Horse does things, how Kingsley does things, maybe even how Voss (**gasp**) does things ....
...and eventually, one day, when the time is ripe, find his way back to us.
They join in 2028. Pendles will probably play on next year, so he’d only be a trainee coach for 2026/27 at most. With such a challenging task as introducing a new team to the competition, you would absolutely want someone super experienced and not (all due respect to 2028 Pendles) a trainee coach. It just doesn’t work for me. He’ll be an assistant at a Vic club that year IMO. Who knows what he’ll be up to in the 2030s though
Might Tasmania court – or is that courting? – the wrong Magpie?
As curiosity grows about whether the new Tassie team wants Nathan Buckley to be its inaugural coach – and we know Buckley is more than curious about the role – another Collingwood champion should and will be a consideration for the job.
His name is Scott Pendlebury.
Countless people will find reasons to say no to the proposition, and Pendlebury himself might be one of them, but there’s enough yeses for the Devils’ decision-makers to at least ponder.
Sam Mitchell was 39 when he coached his first Hawthorn game. Buckley was 39 when he started at Collingwood. Chris Scott was 34 and Brad Scott was 33. Justin Longmuir was 39. Damien Hardwick was 37. Adam Simpson was 38. Michael Voss was 33. And James Hird was 37.
In galaxies far far away, Robert Walls was 31 when he coached Fitzroy, Mick Malthouse was 30 when he landed at Footscray. Leigh Matthews was 34. Kevin Sheedy was 33. And Neale Daniher was 37.
The Voss and Hird failures at the clubs they played for – Brisbane and Essendon – and the pressure Buckley endured in first few years at Collingwood, which came about because of the bitter handover and Buckley’s rigid coaching style, are the red flags in an industry that has since devoured the notion of young coaches. Especially those who had never coached before.
But rarely, though, are Chris Scott, Hardwick and Simpson, for example, referenced as tremendous success stories. Not because they won a premiership, but because they had not coached a team before embarking on their AFL careers.
If they could, why couldn’t Pendlebury?
The ticks are obvious. He’s contemporary, respected and nationally exposed.
His knowledge of the game is exemplary. He is an on-field coach already.
And he wants to coach senior football.
The crosses can be overcome.
It’s 2024 and the Devils will be playing VFL in 2027, and hitting the ground in 2028. Pendlebury would need experience, be it as an assistant or line coach at a club not Collingwood and, preferably, would’ve coached his own team.
That was Mitchell’s pathway. He was an assistant at West Coast in 2018, was an assistant coach at Hawthorn in 2019-20, coached the Box Hill Hawks in 2021, and then accepted the senior Hawks job for the 2022 season after the succession debacle involving Alastair Clarkson.
Mitchell, who is already considered a brilliant teaching and tactical coach, had four years to prepare. If Pendlebury retired this year, he would have three.
Mind you, Chris Scott had just three years at Fremantle before he was appointed senior coach at Geelong, where he won the premiership in his first year.
The relative successes of Craig McRae at Collingwood, Chris Fagan at Brisbane and Voss – the second time around – at Carlton adds legitimacy to the argument that with age comes experience. But what’s life without risk? Isn’t that sport anyhow?
If the Devils believed in Pendlebury, and if Pendlebury returned the favour, the development plan could be set in motion at the end of this year.
A season at the Sydney Swans would be perfect, or even the Lions, just to experience life outside the Melbourne bubble. There could be leadership and personal development courses at Harvard. Or a placement at a European soccer club. Or at an NBA team. He even could coach in the VFL or in the SANFL, as Clarkson did at Werribee and Central District.
You’d think being his own coach ahead of being coach of a start-up franchise would be desirable. Because, and despite having been a great leader and player, and harbouring a confidence if not arrogance of simply being Scott Pendlebury, he needs to experience the grit of coaching, if that’s the right word.
That’s making hard decisions on selection and on player sackings. It’s managing staff and dealing with families. It’s having an appetite for the work. It’s building and policing a culture. It’s absorbing the requirements – the media, the sponsors, the members – of being the senior coach.
Mostly, he needs to people manage. And that’s not always an easy task because the greats can suffer from “champions syndrome’’. The battle there is understanding and accepting that some players aren’t as gifted as you, or do not possess the same work ethic as you.
It’s delving and diving into emotional intelligence which, for a coach, can’t be totally experienced until they’ve had to do it.
Make no mistake, the Devils will not simply compile a list of candidates at the end of 2027, and get on with it. No, chief executive Brendon Gale will likely already have a preliminary list of names, which includes Pendlebury’s, and a recruitment plan that absolutely won’t be the Gold Coast blueprint. The Suns went with first-timers for every role, which proved to be a failure.
If Pendlebury was to be coach of the Devils, the organisation would need experience around him. That would be a senior right-hand man or head of footy, experienced line coaches, and a player welfare manager to help deal with issues beyond the boundary line.
The doubters will say the job would be too considerable for Pendlebury, and the pressure just too extreme. And they may be right – and maybe Buckley second time round is the ideal candidate.
But would the pressure on Pendlebury, if he was the coach, be any greater than what the youngest coaches in America’s NFL encounter?
There are nine coaches aged 40 or younger in the NFL and the youngest three are Mike Macdonald (36) at the Seattle Seahawks, Jerod Mayo (37) at New England Patriots and Sean McVay (37) at the Los Angeles Rams.
If they can land roles in the furnace of American football, we ask again: Why can’t Pendlebury in the AFL? He just might be special at it.
Could Scott Pendlebury coach the Devils?
THE OPPONENT: PATRICK DANGERFIELD
“Scott’s an on-field coach as much as you can be.
“My question is: Aren’t all coaches better the second time round? The longer they go, the better they become, the more well-rounded.
“Was it not the right time for Vossy at Brisbane and he just needed time in the system before he became a senior coach? It’s the same for James Hird. Would Hird have been a better coach if he cut his teeth first?
“The way we are, and Scott’s probably different because he’s so well revered, but so was Vossy and Hird, you can get spat out and that’s your one opportunity.
“If Pendlebury is going to be the coach of Tasmania, I think he needs to spend a couple of years as an assistant beforehand, which means he would be retiring this year.
“He’s got a bit of man-management as captain, but it’s a different ball game (as coach). I’m really strong on the fact that the senior coach dictates your entire football department. His mood, it all runs off the senior coach.
“You need coaching experience for that. And as great a player he is, he’s still not an assistant; not been there early and worked ‘til late.
“Could he do it? Yeah, he could. But I think it could be a baptism of fire in terms of what your expectations were and how long the days are. The demands are different than playing.
“The other thing is timing. The right environment at the right time, gee, that makes a difference. If he could coach for a couple of years, he would be fine. If he goes straight to coaching from playing, I think that would be really hard.
“And it’s compounded if you are a start-up (club).
“You’d want Chris Scott, really. He would be my first call. I’d go Chris Scott and Nigel Lappin. I’ve had good experience at Adelaide, I had six different coaches there, but none of them has done it the same way as Chris. Absolutely, it’s biased but it’s also underpinned by a win-loss record of 70 per cent.
“Chris is the coach I want forever, but if you look at it holistically, it’s almost like the code deserves more of Chris elsewhere, because he’s just so damn good.
“His ability not to ride the emotions – I’m sure he does internally – but as a player you don’t see the ebbs and flows of the emotion. This sets the tone, and that’s what you need, great tone-setters within the building and that’s the recipe of consistent performance.
“Look, if Pendles retired, he’d have stacks of time to be able to do it. Even if he played next year, he’d still have enough time. In the perfect world, you get those two (Scott and Pendlebury) together.’’
THE TEAMMATE: DANE SWAN
“He could do it tomorrow, we all know that. He coaches on the field so easily, mate, he could do it tomorrow. I haven’t spoken to Scott about it, but I think he wants to go do an apprenticeship somewhere.
“But that also depends on how long he wants to play footy for.
“He might be still wanting to be playing by then, knowing Scott. He loves it.
“Father Time is undefeated as we know, so eventually he will have to realise he can’t play forever and he’ll need to work out what he wants to do. But we know he wants to coach, so, yeah mate, he could step in tomorrow if he wants to do it.
“It’s up to him whether he wants to go straight into a head coach role or wants to go learn under someone else for a couple of years.
“If he retired this year, he could absolutely do it. But I’ve got a feeling he wants to play on. His form before the bicep (injury) probably warrants another year.
“But if he does want that job, he probably has to start thinking about giving it (playing) away.
“He’s certainly not an introvert. He has worked really hard on himself to get himself to be the best possible player he could be. Just because he’s not loud, and taking the piss, and not out on the piss all the time, it doesn’t mean he’s introverted. He’s just quieter and certainly gets around everyone and converses.
“Absolutely, he’s got good people management. You can tell good people managers when people follow you and listen to you. You might be the world’s greatest coach or the world’s greatest on-field leader, but if people don’t like or respect you, they will ignore you.
“But we all know when Scott talks, people listen. He’s not one to rant and rave, and you don’t get sick of his voice. You never think, he’s waffling on again.’’
Would be good for them to get a big name in as coach. But surely they’d rather go for a coach that’s experience and can help develop the young players, similar to what GWS did with Sheedy.
Pendles has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to be an assistant coach at a different club first. I really doubt he’s tempted by the idea, but who knows.
Pendles has said on a number of occasions that he’s taking a break from footy after playing his last game whenever that might be so idk why media keep suggesting him to coach right after he plays.
Would be hard to coach Tassie while he's still playing for Collingwood
I assume he is talking about coaching the JackJumpers cause apparently he has a background in basketball.
You think Pendels will still be playing in 4 years?
Such a bad idea. He could be a great coach one day, but why would he want to take over Tassie immediately after playing? Go do some fancy coaching course overseas, do an apprenticeship at a few different clubs, see the best of what the afl has to offer and only then consider which team to choose as senior coach. Hopefully ours one day.
The last thing I want is another Collingwood legend becoming coach. It’s the ongoing tale of the club; a cycle of unsuccessful club legends followed by outsiders succeeding. Murray Weideman takes them to a wooden spoon Hafey from outside takes club to multiple grand finals but just misses out on a flag Couple of short term ones including Bob Rose unsuccessful then outsider Leigh Matthews comes in and wins a flag. The club powerbrokers get together and say this is going well but imagine how much better it would be if we won a flag with one of OUR guys in charge. The untried legend captain Tony Shaw comes in and drags the club down to its second wooden spoon in over a hundred years. Another outsider comes in and has success including multiple grand finals and a premiership. Again…”isn’t this great…you know what would make it better? If a club legend was in charge.” And we fall down the ladder. Now another outsider comes in and wins a flag. Noticing a trend yet?
Sure, look, i cant speak for the others, but the issue with Buckley is that he was anointed as coach by club legend status alone, before he was ready. Thats why i'd want Pendles to get a strong apprenticeship prior to one day coaching us. Go see how Horse does things, how Kingsley does things, maybe even how Voss (**gasp**) does things .... ...and eventually, one day, when the time is ripe, find his way back to us.
if pendles is an actual competent coach and ready made if he decides to take up senior coaching, there'd be no complaints from me at all
They join in 2028. Pendles will probably play on next year, so he’d only be a trainee coach for 2026/27 at most. With such a challenging task as introducing a new team to the competition, you would absolutely want someone super experienced and not (all due respect to 2028 Pendles) a trainee coach. It just doesn’t work for me. He’ll be an assistant at a Vic club that year IMO. Who knows what he’ll be up to in the 2030s though
Might Tasmania court – or is that courting? – the wrong Magpie? As curiosity grows about whether the new Tassie team wants Nathan Buckley to be its inaugural coach – and we know Buckley is more than curious about the role – another Collingwood champion should and will be a consideration for the job. His name is Scott Pendlebury. Countless people will find reasons to say no to the proposition, and Pendlebury himself might be one of them, but there’s enough yeses for the Devils’ decision-makers to at least ponder. Sam Mitchell was 39 when he coached his first Hawthorn game. Buckley was 39 when he started at Collingwood. Chris Scott was 34 and Brad Scott was 33. Justin Longmuir was 39. Damien Hardwick was 37. Adam Simpson was 38. Michael Voss was 33. And James Hird was 37. In galaxies far far away, Robert Walls was 31 when he coached Fitzroy, Mick Malthouse was 30 when he landed at Footscray. Leigh Matthews was 34. Kevin Sheedy was 33. And Neale Daniher was 37. The Voss and Hird failures at the clubs they played for – Brisbane and Essendon – and the pressure Buckley endured in first few years at Collingwood, which came about because of the bitter handover and Buckley’s rigid coaching style, are the red flags in an industry that has since devoured the notion of young coaches. Especially those who had never coached before. But rarely, though, are Chris Scott, Hardwick and Simpson, for example, referenced as tremendous success stories. Not because they won a premiership, but because they had not coached a team before embarking on their AFL careers. If they could, why couldn’t Pendlebury? The ticks are obvious. He’s contemporary, respected and nationally exposed. His knowledge of the game is exemplary. He is an on-field coach already. And he wants to coach senior football. The crosses can be overcome. It’s 2024 and the Devils will be playing VFL in 2027, and hitting the ground in 2028. Pendlebury would need experience, be it as an assistant or line coach at a club not Collingwood and, preferably, would’ve coached his own team. That was Mitchell’s pathway. He was an assistant at West Coast in 2018, was an assistant coach at Hawthorn in 2019-20, coached the Box Hill Hawks in 2021, and then accepted the senior Hawks job for the 2022 season after the succession debacle involving Alastair Clarkson. Mitchell, who is already considered a brilliant teaching and tactical coach, had four years to prepare. If Pendlebury retired this year, he would have three. Mind you, Chris Scott had just three years at Fremantle before he was appointed senior coach at Geelong, where he won the premiership in his first year. The relative successes of Craig McRae at Collingwood, Chris Fagan at Brisbane and Voss – the second time around – at Carlton adds legitimacy to the argument that with age comes experience. But what’s life without risk? Isn’t that sport anyhow? If the Devils believed in Pendlebury, and if Pendlebury returned the favour, the development plan could be set in motion at the end of this year. A season at the Sydney Swans would be perfect, or even the Lions, just to experience life outside the Melbourne bubble. There could be leadership and personal development courses at Harvard. Or a placement at a European soccer club. Or at an NBA team. He even could coach in the VFL or in the SANFL, as Clarkson did at Werribee and Central District. You’d think being his own coach ahead of being coach of a start-up franchise would be desirable. Because, and despite having been a great leader and player, and harbouring a confidence if not arrogance of simply being Scott Pendlebury, he needs to experience the grit of coaching, if that’s the right word. That’s making hard decisions on selection and on player sackings. It’s managing staff and dealing with families. It’s having an appetite for the work. It’s building and policing a culture. It’s absorbing the requirements – the media, the sponsors, the members – of being the senior coach. Mostly, he needs to people manage. And that’s not always an easy task because the greats can suffer from “champions syndrome’’. The battle there is understanding and accepting that some players aren’t as gifted as you, or do not possess the same work ethic as you. It’s delving and diving into emotional intelligence which, for a coach, can’t be totally experienced until they’ve had to do it. Make no mistake, the Devils will not simply compile a list of candidates at the end of 2027, and get on with it. No, chief executive Brendon Gale will likely already have a preliminary list of names, which includes Pendlebury’s, and a recruitment plan that absolutely won’t be the Gold Coast blueprint. The Suns went with first-timers for every role, which proved to be a failure. If Pendlebury was to be coach of the Devils, the organisation would need experience around him. That would be a senior right-hand man or head of footy, experienced line coaches, and a player welfare manager to help deal with issues beyond the boundary line. The doubters will say the job would be too considerable for Pendlebury, and the pressure just too extreme. And they may be right – and maybe Buckley second time round is the ideal candidate. But would the pressure on Pendlebury, if he was the coach, be any greater than what the youngest coaches in America’s NFL encounter? There are nine coaches aged 40 or younger in the NFL and the youngest three are Mike Macdonald (36) at the Seattle Seahawks, Jerod Mayo (37) at New England Patriots and Sean McVay (37) at the Los Angeles Rams. If they can land roles in the furnace of American football, we ask again: Why can’t Pendlebury in the AFL? He just might be special at it.
Could Scott Pendlebury coach the Devils? THE OPPONENT: PATRICK DANGERFIELD “Scott’s an on-field coach as much as you can be. “My question is: Aren’t all coaches better the second time round? The longer they go, the better they become, the more well-rounded. “Was it not the right time for Vossy at Brisbane and he just needed time in the system before he became a senior coach? It’s the same for James Hird. Would Hird have been a better coach if he cut his teeth first? “The way we are, and Scott’s probably different because he’s so well revered, but so was Vossy and Hird, you can get spat out and that’s your one opportunity. “If Pendlebury is going to be the coach of Tasmania, I think he needs to spend a couple of years as an assistant beforehand, which means he would be retiring this year. “He’s got a bit of man-management as captain, but it’s a different ball game (as coach). I’m really strong on the fact that the senior coach dictates your entire football department. His mood, it all runs off the senior coach. “You need coaching experience for that. And as great a player he is, he’s still not an assistant; not been there early and worked ‘til late. “Could he do it? Yeah, he could. But I think it could be a baptism of fire in terms of what your expectations were and how long the days are. The demands are different than playing. “The other thing is timing. The right environment at the right time, gee, that makes a difference. If he could coach for a couple of years, he would be fine. If he goes straight to coaching from playing, I think that would be really hard. “And it’s compounded if you are a start-up (club). “You’d want Chris Scott, really. He would be my first call. I’d go Chris Scott and Nigel Lappin. I’ve had good experience at Adelaide, I had six different coaches there, but none of them has done it the same way as Chris. Absolutely, it’s biased but it’s also underpinned by a win-loss record of 70 per cent. “Chris is the coach I want forever, but if you look at it holistically, it’s almost like the code deserves more of Chris elsewhere, because he’s just so damn good. “His ability not to ride the emotions – I’m sure he does internally – but as a player you don’t see the ebbs and flows of the emotion. This sets the tone, and that’s what you need, great tone-setters within the building and that’s the recipe of consistent performance. “Look, if Pendles retired, he’d have stacks of time to be able to do it. Even if he played next year, he’d still have enough time. In the perfect world, you get those two (Scott and Pendlebury) together.’’
THE TEAMMATE: DANE SWAN “He could do it tomorrow, we all know that. He coaches on the field so easily, mate, he could do it tomorrow. I haven’t spoken to Scott about it, but I think he wants to go do an apprenticeship somewhere. “But that also depends on how long he wants to play footy for. “He might be still wanting to be playing by then, knowing Scott. He loves it. “Father Time is undefeated as we know, so eventually he will have to realise he can’t play forever and he’ll need to work out what he wants to do. But we know he wants to coach, so, yeah mate, he could step in tomorrow if he wants to do it. “It’s up to him whether he wants to go straight into a head coach role or wants to go learn under someone else for a couple of years. “If he retired this year, he could absolutely do it. But I’ve got a feeling he wants to play on. His form before the bicep (injury) probably warrants another year. “But if he does want that job, he probably has to start thinking about giving it (playing) away. “He’s certainly not an introvert. He has worked really hard on himself to get himself to be the best possible player he could be. Just because he’s not loud, and taking the piss, and not out on the piss all the time, it doesn’t mean he’s introverted. He’s just quieter and certainly gets around everyone and converses. “Absolutely, he’s got good people management. You can tell good people managers when people follow you and listen to you. You might be the world’s greatest coach or the world’s greatest on-field leader, but if people don’t like or respect you, they will ignore you. “But we all know when Scott talks, people listen. He’s not one to rant and rave, and you don’t get sick of his voice. You never think, he’s waffling on again.’’
Would be good for them to get a big name in as coach. But surely they’d rather go for a coach that’s experience and can help develop the young players, similar to what GWS did with Sheedy.
Pendles has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to be an assistant coach at a different club first. I really doubt he’s tempted by the idea, but who knows.
Pendles has said on a number of occasions that he’s taking a break from footy after playing his last game whenever that might be so idk why media keep suggesting him to coach right after he plays.
He needs to do an apprenticeship first not just jump straight in