Emma Quayle is an award-winning journalist and draft expert who spent 16 years covering AFL for The Age newspaper before joining the GIANTS’ recruiting team in February, 2017. As one of the industry’s most respected writers and talent spotters, Quayle has a unique perspective on the GIANTS’ recent crop of draftees and takes you inside the thinking of the recruiting team. In the final installment of her insightful six-part series, Quayle sits down with selection 14, Jackson Hately.
Jackson Hately played a lot of senior football in Adelaide last year, for his team at Central Districts. He played on the MCG for the AFL Academy, and kicked a couple of goals. He helped lead South Australia’s under-18 side to a national title, and gave a speech at his Year 12 graduation ceremony as head prefect and one of his school’s captains, just a few days after being drafted to the GIANTS in the first round.
But none of that made him as nervous as the time he was in the school band, and was given a pretty big job to do. “I played the trumpet for a while, back when I was in the band. I did it for about five years and haven’t played for a couple of years now, but at the time I didn’t mind it. It was a good group of kids in the school band,” Jackson said.
FAN DAY: Meet Jackson Hately and the rest of the GIANTS' AFL, AFLW and Netball stars this Saturday!
“I got asked to play the Last Post one day, and that was pretty scary. It was one of the scariest things I’ve actually ever done, doing that in front of 1,000 people at school. I was in Year 10 and it was a fair bit of pressure, just you there in front of all those people, such a big occasion and everyone watching and just being so quiet.
“I don’t really get nervous before footy games, but when they asked me to do that I just thought ‘oh no, I don’t want to do that.’ But I thought about it and just thought, ‘I might as well give it a crack.’ I’m so happy I’ve done it now. At the time I didn’t think I could, or didn’t think I wanted to, but it’s something I’m glad I got to do.”
Jackson is like that, once he gets his mind on something. His persistence, dependability, versatility and ability to compete and keep performing were just some of the things that appealed to us when we were thinking about him, putting our draft order together and talking about how he might fit into our team and at our club. He’s shown those qualities doing all sorts of different things, over the years.
His musical career didn’t last too long. But as a basketballer, Jackson played for his state, top-scoring at the national championships as a 16-year-old before his bigger love, football, got in the way. He played against top three pick Izak Rankine as a kid, the two robust rivals until they just seemed to forget one day why they fired each other up.
“We might have been Year 9, when we played against each other for the first time. I had no idea who he was and for whatever reason we just used to get into each other. I think that was just the competitive spirit we both had; he would do something and then I’d do something and then we’d be talking to each other again and going back at each other all day,” Jackson said.
“We met again at the state 16 tryouts, and we hardly even remembered that stuff and just started becoming mates from there. I played against him in more knock-out stuff and when we went to America with the national academy we had some time in LA and we found some courts at Venice Beach and were there for hours, four or five hours just playing two on two with all these local guys who turned up.
“I still love basketball, but it was funny, because they pick an All Star five out of the under-16 nationals and four of the five guys ended up playing under-19s for Australia. I was the other one and I was already gone and off playing footy instead.
“I think it’s just that basketball doesn’t always have the same team aspect to it. There’s role players on the court, but it’s almost like one player can change the game much more than someone can in a game of footy. And I don’t know, I just love running around a bit more than you can on the basketball court. There’s just something about footy that I’ve just always loved a bit more more. Things started to happen with footy, and I wanted to commit more of myself. It got more serious and I thought, ‘this is where I want to put all my time.”
Jackson was similarly focused leading into last season. Having trained with the senior team throughout the pre-season he wanted to play with them. As soon as he could, and for as long as he could. He made the round one Centrals team, and went straight back after the national championships, to pick up where he left off.
“I was really determined, I really wanted to play league,” he said. “I remember having a chat with Roy Laird, who was our coach, a few weeks into preseason, and he said, ‘I can see you maybe getting a game midway through the year if we get some injuries.’
“I knew I wanted to play round one and I kept thinking about what he said, but if anything it just motivated me a little bit to make sure it was my goal and make sure I did it. I knew when he said it that he didn’t have me in his best team, but I thought that if I played well in a couple of trial games I could maybe win him over.
“It was hard. There were some tough moments, but I always thought I could do it and it was such a good experience. To play league footy was really big for me.”
It took him out of his comfort zone, which moving to Sydney has done again. Jackson was not only the Trinity Grammar captain last year, he was the son of the school principal. He was born in Canberra – where his father, Nick, met his mother, Melinda – and has lived in a house on school campuses for most of his life.
“It’s all I’ve known, it’s just normal to me. We’ve been at Trinity for about nine years but even before then Dad worked at other places and even in a boarding house for a while, so we stayed in there too. It’s something we’ve just always done,” he said.
“As a kid, it’s been amazing. I’ve had a footy oval 50 metres from my house, so I could just walk over there in the morning or go for a run or go down and use the basketball courts, the indoor stadium. It was pretty amazing and a lot of people say to me ‘how much does it suck to live at school?’ but I’ve always felt lucky, like I’ve just got this massive backyard and I’ve got it all to myself sometimes.
“You might think you get cut off from society, but living at school and even at the boarding house, you meet so many kids and such a massive range of people. It’s hard to explain – you can sort of feel it more than anything – but you just get used to meeting people and getting to know them and feeling comfortable around them.
“I think it’s been good for me, and sort of got me ready to leave and meet even more new people. I always had this feeling that I would be drafted interstate, I don’t know why, but I just had it in my head that I was going to move. So now that it’s happened, it’s pretty cool. I’m stoked that I’m here. I can’t wait to get into it.”
