Kate Darby: The Blue From Out of The Blue
- Feb 6, 2017
- 5 min read
Perth closes early in August, settling into a doze as the sailing boats return home across the Swan River. Late into the night, a small café is stretching its arms, yawning and having another look at the clock. The last two customers are Carlton’s Women’s coach Damien Keeping and assistant coach Graham Burgen. Keeping is tall, Burgen short and squinting into the bottom of a mug of coffee. They look like the Blues Brothers, but they’re not on a mission from God: they’re on a mission to find any unearthed talent ahead of the inaugural AFL Women’s draft in October.
Burgen takes one last swig from the mug and over the rim of his glass sees two young men grinning come through the café door: Fremantle defender Tom Sheridan and Adelaide midfielder Rory Atkins. In another lifetime, they were players under Burgen’s coaching at the Calder Cannons back in Victoria (Sheridan to this day describes Burgen as “one of my big mentors”). It’s a service neither has forgotten: in a few hours’ time, they will be going head-to-head on Subiaco Oval but they’re here to see Burgen after he called ahead to let them know he was in town.
“What are you over for?” asks Sheridan as the four men settle at the table. Burgen pushes the now empty mug aside and reveals the mission.
“Having a look at a couple of kids play tomorrow.” “What for?” “We’re trying to find players for the women’s draft.”
Things happened very quickly in Sheridan’s mind: a flashback to his junior career in north-west Victoria at Riddells Creek when he played with a kid named Matt Darby who went on to make Essendon’s VFL list. After their games together, they would sit on the outer fence, arms folded on the rail as they watched Matt’s sister, a winger whose ferocious attack on the ball could scatter packs of panicked players…
“Mate, I’ll give you a player: Kate Darby.”
It didn’t take anything more than an on-the-spot flick through Darby’s Facebook on Sheridan’s phone for the neurons to spark for Keeping and Burgen.
“He showed us these pictures of her bungee jumping and you go, ‘This is an outdoor girl,’” recalls Burgen. “I wanted to meet her right there and then.”
The next day, Burgen and Keeping watched the WAWFL semi-final between the Coastal Titans and Swan Districts alongside Fremantle’s Women’s coach Michelle Cowan. The match hit national headlines when Titan player and Fremantle marquee selection Kiara Bowers ruptured her ACL, causing the Dockers to replace her with none other than the two players Burgen and Keeping had crossed the Nullarbor to watch.
Cowan watched on, crestfallen, as one of her best players was taken from the field on a stretcher. Burgen slipped off quietly and reached into his pocket….
…. on the other side of the country, on a chairlift halfway up the ski slopes of Mount Hotham, Kate Darby’s phone rang.
“When I got the message from Tommy, I thought it was one of his many fans hacking his Facebook,” laughs Darby, who has played just four matches of school footy since being forced to hang up the boots at the age of 13. “That small thought has brought something that I never even thought was a possibility and my 15-year old dream has come true.”
“Footy’s always been my massive passion sports wise. When I was a junior I was small, so I had that run-down, that see-ball, get-ball thing.”
The 26-year old, living in Torquay when she got the call from Burgen, hadn’t even thought of applying for the draft. Which, as Burgen and Keeping knew, made her the perfect secret to slip past other clubs. She jumped at the opportunity to meet the pair at IKON Park for a one-on-one skills session.
Observing his new acquisition punting the ball at short range into the protective net behind the goals, Burgen called out to her.
“Kate!” “Yeah?” “Just kick it as far as you can out to me!”
Darby stepped inside the goal square, wound up and let it go. Burgen stood arms spread on the paint of the 50-metre mark and the ball sailed over his head like a plane coming in to land at Melbourne Airport. The ball bounced and jagged and rolled its own way to a stop because neither Burgen nor Keeping had moved, except to turn to face each other as their expressions turned from disbelief to wicked grins. The monster was out of the bag.
Following the training, Darby was told to “hang tight” by Keeping, not knowing that the decision to select her late in the draft had virtually been made. Now all that was left was to keep Darby a secret that the Blues could bank on. For two months. What could possibly go wrong?
Enter a man who knew Darby from her career at Riddells Creek, where his sons Ryan, Jordan, Harrison and Jesse had played. Who was still good friends with Darby’s parents Peter and Robyn. Who bumped into Peter in the street and was excitedly told that Carlton were interested in Kate. Who then went to his job as a radio host on Triple M and revealed that he had “the biggest smoky in the draft. I’m not going to name names, but…”
Brian Taylor.
Luckily, Keeping was listening to the commentator’s broadcast at the time and drew an immediate parallel between Taylor’s early association with Darby and his inside knowledge of a draftee. He frantically called Burgen, who knew Taylor from his days at Calder Cannons when Taylor’s son was in the squad. Burgen jumped on the grenade and clued Taylor in on the conspiracy.
Ruefully chuckling that he “wasn’t surprised” that the former Cannons coach would be the one pulling the three-card trick in the draft, Taylor has stuck to his guns about Darby’s potential since making his initial half-reveal.
“She’s going to do really well in this competition just because she’s tall and athletic and knows the game well,” he says. “Her parents told me that Carlton were looking at her and that they were trying to keep it quiet. Burgs got onto me to say he was doing some private coaching with her and keeping her under wraps.”
With competition for picks so fierce leading up to the draft, Burgen and Keeping were desperate to hide Darby from the clutches of any rival clubs who may have been snooping around.
So much so, in fact, that in the fortnight leading up to the draft precautions were taken to quarantine Darby, including telling her to be wary of answering any calls from unknown numbers.
“She was ringing me up saying, ‘Who’s this guy?’ And I’d just say, just ignore it,” says Burgen.
However, Darby’s loyalty to Carlton was something Burgen hadn’t wagered on.
“It was hard not to call back because I didn’t want to seem rude,” she admits, “but I already felt like I had such a connection with the guys at Carlton that I wasn’t interested in going elsewhere.”
And Carlton had no interest in her going elsewhere either. On October 12, she was taken at pick 126 in the inaugural AFL Women’s draft to put the finishing touches on the elaborate heist.
Kate Darby is the first great recruitment story of AFL Women’s. All that’s left now is to see just how well she can adjust to her return to footy, but she certainly doesn’t want for passion.
“The first training became very real very quickly. They said that this might be all crazy and exciting and a dream come true but we’re not here to sit down and enjoy it, we’re here to win a premiership.
“We really want to work hard and the girls that I’m with are unbelievable. I could not be happier with the team that we’ve got.”
And Graham Burgen has no doubt that the draftee secret he crossed the country for won’t be an unknown for long in the new competition.
“She’s big and tough. She’ll play key back and,” guesses Burgen, “she’ll play like a pit bull. She’ll hurt people. They’ll have nightmares about her.”
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