Tim Taranto knew Will Setterfield, from playing for the Sandringham Dragons. Setterfield had travelled to America with Zach Sproule, as part of the AFL Academy. Sproule played for the same Murray Bushrangers side as Lachie Tiziani, and Tiziani knew Isaac Cumming because they both grew up in Broken Hill. Then there is Harry Perryman, who played with Setterfield, Sproule and Cumming for the Allies in last year’s national championships but has gotten to know all of them much better since the GIANTS brought them together at the draft. It has helped him settle quickly into his new club and his altered life, as it has the others. “We all knew each other pretty well before getting picked up,” said Cumming. “We just gelled together, and obviously spend every day and most nights together. We get up to some fun and really enjoy each other’s company.”

Cumming knew he was going to have to move from home before the draft came around, whether he was ready and no matter which team picked him. Perryman was the same. Tiziani was desperate to move, having missed out in 2016, and so was Sproule after every club overlooked him at first, leaving him for the rookie draft. For a while after he moved to Sydney from Melbourne, Taranto wondered what he was missing out on back home and what his friends were getting up to without him. Those thoughts faded the busier he became, as they did for Setterfield, who thought he was prepared to move having spent a few years in a boarding house at Caulfield Grammar but soon worked out there was much more to get used to than just living in a new city. Cooking. Cleaning. Getting to know a whole new group of teammates and coaches. Training harder than he ever had before. Finding his way around, paying bills and some even simpler things, as Sproule reminds him. “Checking the mail, so that you actually get your bills.”

From their first day at the club, the six draftees understood that it didn’t really matter how they made their way their, that whatever they did from there would matter much more. “I reckon most of the boys wouldn’t even know which number pick we were,” said Taranto, pick No. 2. “Once you get here, you just get into it.”

Since then, they have set about things in different ways, under different circumstances and confronted with different challenges. Drafted as a 19-year-old, Tiziani felt like his first job was to show people how much he appreciated his chance and to continue changing their minds on him. “It definitely made me grow as a person, missing out when I was 18,” he said. “I was a bit immature. People say that I mucked around a bit and didn’t take my footy seriously. My diet wasn’t too good, and I was pretty unfit, but I copped it on the chin and worked hard at what I had to do.”

Playing in the forward line for the GIANTS’ NEAFL side, he has learnt there is a lot more to being a good forward than he thought there was. “I only used to sprint, not really run. I couldn’t run, but now I’m learning what to do,” he said. So is Sproule, who spent most of the season alongside him, trying to think about the way he plays in new ways. “Last year I didn’t even think sprint metres or how many sprints you do during games,” he said. “At the start of the year I was a plodder and I was probably pretty easy to defend. It’s a bit more complicated. Sprints are a big part of my game now, how I can actually get off my opponent and just little ways to move around the ground better. I’m looking at my GPS stuff a lot more than last year, and how that can actually improve my game and how I can get off my defender a bit easier.”

Knowing someone is always watching has helped, too. Cumming had never spent much time in the backline before he got to the GIANTS and when he started to train there in the preseason he had a lot of questions about what he was meant to be doing there. What he realised quickly was that he was every move he made was being closely observed, and that if he had a question he just had to ask. “When we train there’s over a dozen coaches watching everyone, and I think your room for improvement gets noticed pretty early because their eyes are on you, seeing what you’re like and what you’re made of,” he said. “They identify your weaknesses pretty quickly and work just as hard as to fix them up. Coming from country footy, the coaches here are full of knowledge. They’ve been there and played the game themselves and have devoted their lives to making other players better and making the team better. If they have any feedback you just take it on board and I suppose it’s up to you to you to go and do the work to improve.”

For Cumming, Sproule and Tiziani, that work has been done away from the AFL team, on game day at least. Perryman, Taranto and Setterfield have found out sooner what it is like to play in the senior team, though their experiences of it have been very different. Perryman made the round nine team, a team that would not have beaten Richmond had he not got a fingertip to a shot on goal late in the game. Four weeks later he was dropped, another month later he was back and four weeks after that he was back in the NEAFL again. Each time he came in or went out of the senior side Leon Cameron explained exactly why, and that made it easier for him to slide between both teams without feeling like he was losing momentum or the confidence of his coaches. Not that it’s in his nature to over-think things. “There’s a bit of shock at the time when you get dropped, but Leon’s pretty good about it,” Perryman said. “He just tells you to go back and get a kick, and luckily enough a spot opened up because of injuries and I got a few more games.”

Setterfield’s first injury, to his groin, came after he had played some preseason games with the senior side. On the one hand, that made it hard to deal with; he felt close to playing real games with them, like he knew what he was missing out on. On the other hand, it helped him understand exactly what he was working back towards. And it gave him the chance to see Ryan Griffen and Stephen Coniglio, injured at the same time, handled their time out, paying an incredible attention to every single little detail in rehab, day after day, after day. “They just do a lot of little extras and do everything they can to get themselves back out there, extra boxing and all those little things to get themselves on the park,” said Setterfield, who realised their effort wasn’t only about urgency.

“It tests your patience. To keep progressing and keep getting everything right, you have to wait. I guess rehab was good because I was able to get a bit stronger and put a bit more weight on, to be able to play with the big boys. I think it was after four games I came back, and I felt ready. I had a few things to work on in the NEAFL from Leon to do with my running, so that was my main area, to get my running ready so it was good enough for the elite level, because it’s a quick game. I was out for a month with the groin stuff and came back and played two games and did my ankle, so I missed plenty of footy but I guess it was just like a big learning curve for me.”

It was the same for Taranto, who had played 12 games when he hurt his ankle midway through the season. In his first few games he was trying to get used to a hundred things at once - where his teammates were going to run; where they wanted him to run to - and football felt faster than it had before. “I was playing real safe,” he said, “and I didn’t want to make a mistake.”

After a few games he started to feel more settled, only to get injured, head into rehab and have a whole new list of things to work on. “The good thing here, especially in your first few games, is that they make your role really simple. They don’t try and complicate it,” he said of his first games. “They back you in that you’ve done the work in the preseason and the preseason games, and keep your role as simple as possible, and then you’ve got to go out and do it,” he said. “There’s definitely moments in every training session, and I’m sure we all do it, where you think ‘geez, I need to get better at this,’ and then there’s times when you go ‘geez, I’m actually going all right at this.’

“It’s different (in rehab). It’s more focusing on you, and it’s all about getting yourself right. You can do your own thing, whatever you need to get yourself back on the track as quickly as possible. There’s some good parts of it, I guess. You get to work on your own game a bit more, but it’s definitely pretty average in there. I guess it’s weird. Things take a while to kick in for me, so for the first week or two I was up and about and all right. Then probably two or three weeks later I started to realise, ‘geez, it’s not a good time of the year to get injured.’ It sucks… but on the track with the other boys, I think you’ve just got to enjoy that while you can do it.”

Were he to talk to someone starting out, that would be his biggest bit of advice: to lap up the good parts knowing challenges will turn up early. Setterfield’s advice would be similar, to “just have fun and enjoy it. It’s a job, but at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of boys kicking a footy.” Sproule’s tip is to “enjoy your first preseason because the second one’s going to be pretty bad” and Tiziani thinks it’s important to spend time with senior players “because at the start it’s pretty nerve wracking and once you can be yourself around them it’s a great time.” For Cumming, a first-year key has been reminding himself that he is doing the one thing he ever wanted, to be open and to take in all the things that come with it. “We talk about it all the time, how lucky we are to do what we do when every single one of us was a kid dreaming of doing this,” he said. “Now we’ve achieved it and are working towards, hopefully, an AFL career. We’re very fortunate to be an AFL listed player.”