News Giants in the Media

Remove this Banner Ad

Orange crush said:
Kingsley is such an affable guy, but plays everything with a straight bat.

But **** me swinging, 360 is a hard watch
Click to expand...

Yes - it’s a shocker. Joe Biden would bring more life and focus than either of the so-called hosts.

Kingers is making the point re Lachie Ash being innocent and our dodgy frees against.

However, the hosts turning a blind eye.


Sent from my iPhone using BigFooty.com
 
ClockworkOrange said:
Yes - it’s a shocker. Joe Biden would bring more life and focus than either of the so-called hosts.

Kingers is making the point re Lachie Ash being innocent and our dodgy frees against.

However, the hosts turning a blind eye.


Sent from my iPhone using BigFooty.com
Click to expand...
Or Robbo asking if Stormy had a license to attack and not defend …. 13 tackles mate wtf?
 
ClockworkOrange said:
Yes - it’s a shocker. Joe Biden would bring more life and focus than either of the so-called hosts.

Kingers is making the point re Lachie Ash being innocent and our dodgy frees against.

However, the hosts turning a blind eye.


Sent from my iPhone using BigFooty.com
Click to expand...
I like it as a show
 

Log in to remove this ad.

Season 3 No GIF by HULU
 

Mornings with Matt White

Matt White takes you through the morning on 1170 SEN Sydney.
www.sen.com.au www.sen.com.au

Adam Kingsley on sen Sydney mornings today.
 
Probably should be in the Jesse Hogan thread but it's so good I've posted it here :D



 
Last edited:
Giant YoYo said:
Probably should be in the Jesse Hogan thread but it's so good I've posted it here :D

Click to expand...


It's interesting he is the only other player to use the stutter step other than Josh Kennedy. Both have been incredibly accurate and won Coleman medals off the back of the routine, despite being laughed at initially.
 
Bjo187 said:
It's interesting he is the only other player to use the stutter step other than Josh Kennedy. Both have been incredibly accurate and won Coleman medals off the back of the routine, despite being laughed at initially.
Click to expand...
He didn't always do it, did he? I always felt like it was developed partway through his career to address inaccuracy.
 

(Log in to remove this ad.)

ClockworkOrange said:
Breaking News - Hell Freezes Over.

VFL State Media’s Damian Barrett on Triple M today on the Finals:

“I just have a sneaky feeling that one of those top 4 teams - GWS - could cause as much damage as anyone in the weeks to come.”


Sent from my iPhone using BigFooty.com
Click to expand...
He will use it to push a reduction in academies or some other thing. Maybe up the Vics home and away games at the mcg to 20.
 
aflnswact.com.au

Peatling's giant few years - AFL NSW / ACT

By Paul Stephen . One day he was working full time at a Christmas tree farm, the next he was on an AFL list. James Peatling’s career path wasn’t quite like all those AFL players who get drafted from school…Read more ›
aflnswact.com.au aflnswact.com.au

​

Peatling’s giant few years​


One day he was working full time at a Christmas tree farm, the next he was on an AFL list.

James Peatling’s career path wasn’t quite like all those AFL players who get drafted from school and go straight into “the system”.

As he reached his 20s, Peatling was happy working at Leo Demasi and Lynette Macri’s Christmas tree farm in Dural in Sydney’s northwest and playing Sydney footy with Pennant Hills. However, there were unfulfilled aspirations left over from his younger years. He’d won a senior premiership as a 17-year-old alongside current GIANTS teammate Kieran Briggs for Penno in 2017 and was on the usual route – academy, NSW/ACT Allies, under 18s National Championships, reserves games for GIANTS.

It stalled when he didn’t get drafted and his AFL ambitions drifted away.

But it wasn’t the end of the world. He played for the GIANTS reserves in the NEAFL and for Pennant Hills in Sydney’s premier division and was enjoying life.

“I was happy to play with my mates, and then COVID hit. But I was pretty content to play local footy at Pennant Hills and work at the Christmas tree farm,” Peatling said. But there was a nagging feeling that an AFL career was still possible.

An unexpected opportunity

“I was roped back in 2021 by Luke Kelly who was the GIANTS’ VFL coach. He said come down and give it another crack, no pressure to get drafted or anything, he just said he’d love to have me back playing with them,” Peatling said.

“Then I got drafted mid-season without really expecting it. It wasn’t really something I was aspiring to do. But that’s the best thing, when you’re not really expecting it, you value it a bit more,” he added.

So he had to tell Leo and Lynette that his seven years at the farm had to come to an end. He started working with them as a 13-year-old in the school holidays and did everything as he graduated to full time work, from planting, shaping, irrigation, selling and delivering trees.

“Trees I planted at 14, I was selling at 20, that was pretty cool,” he said.

“I was really fortunate to work there, I really enjoyed the outdoor work. They were a lovely Italian family and took me in as one of their own. They were really good to me and really flexible with my footy. They always said to keep going with my footy.”

Fondness for Penno

Peatling was raised in a footy family, his father grew up in Bendigo and moved to Sydney to study and stayed, settling in Toongabbie in the city’s west.

He started playing footy at Toongabbie Primary School, making rep teams and then juniors with Westbrook, before moving at 16 to the seniors at Pennant Hills – the footy production line that has produced many AFL players.

Four years later, he played his last game for the Demons against local rivals East Coast (aka Baulkham Hills) on the Saturday and was drafted on the Wednesday, joining a long list of Penno old boys in the AFL from Terry Thripp in 1983 and Stefan Carey in the 1990s, to Lenny Hayes, Kieren and Brandon Jack, Jarrod and Mark McVeigh, Jackson Ferguson and Adam Chatfield and now Braeden Campbell, Marc Sheather and Kieran Briggs.

“It’s a bit of a footy factory. It’s a pretty footy area, not many winter sports are as strong as AFL in the area. It’s a very well-run club and they put people forward to be the best they can and that’s a big reason quite a few get picked up,” he said.
 

Story made the front of the SMH website.​

​

www.smh.com.au

‘I’m a bit of a non-conformist’: Why this AFL coach lives in a van

Craig Jennings is the GWS Giants’ offence coach. He’s also a rare books salesman, and an animal rescuer. Oh – and he doesn’t have a house. Not in Sydney, anyway.
www.smh.com.au www.smh.com.au
​

‘I’m a bit of a non-conformist’: Why this AFL coach lives in a van​

By Vince Rugari​

August 23, 2024 — 4.00pm

It’s hard to know where to start with Craig Jennings. The best place might be his place, which is also his primary mode of transport, his refuge from the daily grind of the AFL industry, and a family bonding tool.

Jennings lives in a van. A navy blue Ford Transit, to be precise, which was recommended to him by former Hawthorn great Jordan Lewis. In selecting his vehicle, Jennings sacrificed interior comfort for drivability; inside, there’s a mattress, an esky and a battery pack, and not much else, but that’s all he needs.

At around 6-7pm on a typical weekday, when he’s finished up his duties as the GWS Giants’ offence coach, he jumps in the van and drives north from the club’s Olympic Park base, to one of his secret spots along Sydney’s northern beaches. That’s where he’ll settle for the night. Usually, he’s alone; if not, there’ll be a fellow van-lifer there from somewhere around the world to chew the fat with.

If the weather’s kind enough, he’ll leave the back of the van open and fall asleep to the sounds of waves lapping 20 metres away.

By around 6am the next morning, he’s back at the club.

It works for him. All his meals are eaten at the club, served by the Giants’ in-house chef. He takes his showers at the club. He’s there most hours of most days anyway, and many weekends, he’s interstate with the team. And if he really needs to, for whatever reason, he can always spend a night in a hotel.

“I don’t even want to go back to a house. That’s genuine,” Jennings tells this masthead.

“If I could get away with it – which I can’t – but if I could, I’d just live in the van forever. I like freedom. I’m a bit of a non-conformist. I don’t really follow the crowd. People always describe me as dancing to the beat of my own drum or whatever, but I feel what I’m doing is just normal, because I’m doing what I enjoy. Like, ‘I think you’re weird doing what everyone else does.’”

It’s worth noting that this is a lifestyle choice, and not a consequence of Sydney’s high cost of living – which is a real thing for assistant coaches in the AFL’s so-called ‘northern markets’ – and why Jennings (like fellow Giants assistants Brett Montgomery and Ben Hart) live away from their families, who are based in other states, during the seven-month season.

But that’s where the van comes in handy. The Giants play in Melbourne practically every other weekend; that’s where Jennings’ partner and two sons, aged 14 and 12, are based. He’ll often drive down early before a game with the club’s permission, spend time with the family, and then hit the road back to Sydney with the boys, who spend a week with him before flying home.

“Kingers [Giants coach Adam Kingsley] is that good with them,” Jennings says. “When they come up, they’re in training, drills and all sorts of things, playing indoor cricket … it’s just a great experience for my boys, which is a big part of it. Having kids around a footy club in Melbourne is pretty common, but here, it’s a bit of a holiday for them.

“The other part is it’s just such a good club, my favourite that I’ve worked at. You don’t want to leave, and so family-wise, you need to be able to make that part work. At the moment, it’s working really well. I’m probably more present with them now than when [I lived] there.”

Unless you’re an AFL obsessive, or a Victorian, you probably haven’t heard of Jennings, but he is regarded within the industry as one of the game’s sharpest minds – and, clearly, someone who doesn’t fit the typical footy mould.

Selected with pick 45 by North Melbourne at the 1990 AFL draft, Jennings never played a game at the highest level, but was recalled to the club later in the decade by Denis Pagan, the coach who drafted him, to help run some fitness training, and thus his career in coaching began. He also worked under Kevin Sheedy and Mark Thompson during a 10-year apprenticeship at Essendon, spent a year as Luke Beveridge’s opposition analyst at the Western Bulldogs, and then joined Simon Goodwin at Melbourne for four years, steering the Demons to their highly memorable 2018 AFLX crown.

SEN Radio listeners will also recall his regular morning segment with Gerard Whateley, in which he decoded the complicated tactics and strategy behind AFL games with a level of clarity few others in media have demonstrated.

“From the [earliest] time I can remember, after school, I put my footy jumper on, I’m kicking a footy, I felt like I just watched more footy than anybody, and I never got tired of it,” he says. “And then part of it is the psychology. It’s a redemption thing: get drafted, you don’t play a senior game, you don’t want to fail as a coach.”

Jennings, now 50, had opportunities to work at other Melbourne clubs, and harbours ambitions to become a senior coach in his own right one day, but jumped at an offer from the Giants in 2022 for a few different reasons.

One was his natural affinity to Sydney. He was raised in Traralgon, in regional Victoria, but was actually born at North Shore Hospital; his parents happened to be passing through. He was interested in working in a non-traditional market, a prospect made more attractive by the presence of Jason McCartney, the Giants’ head of football, and his old state footy teammate from his teenage years.

And it was also a perfect excuse to cross van life off his bucket list.

“I’m happy in my own company,” he says.

“I love spending time with people, but I’m also comfortable just being on my own, which not everybody is. I don’t need entertainment like other people. At this point in life, I’m not going out socialising or anything. I’m living a pretty quiet lifestyle. I’m happy in that van and sending it in a direction up north, and just driving until I feel like stopping.”

If the term ‘different cat’ was in the dictionary, Jennings’ picture might be there.

Speaking of. One night after work late last year, as Jennings was walking back to his van, he spotted a stray, malnourished cat in the bushes of the Giants’ club carpark. Its head was trapped in a plastic Tupperware container lid.

“I’d see these cats running around,” he says. “So I set up cameras, and started filming them, and then I learnt a bit about how to rescue them through local animal rescuers, and started feeding them so they’d come in. And then over the course of the last nine months, I’ve been catching them where you can.”

Jennings had always hoped football would give him a big enough profile to cross out another bucket-list item: running an animal sanctuary on a big property near Traralgon. He can’t do that right now, but he’s set up a mini-sanctuary out of his house in Melbourne, where eight of the stray cats found in the Giants’ carpark have been transported. Players including Toby Greene and Sam Taylor have donated personal memorabilia to be auctioned off to help pay for vet bills. At the Giants, it’s become a whole thing.

“It’s a passion of mine anyway. It’s not about cats, it’s just animals in general. I can’t handle animals suffering,” Jennings says.

That’s not his only side project, by the way. Jennings also runs a rare book business. As you do. We’re talking books and manuscripts from the 1400s or earlier. That kind of rare.


“They’re all pursuits that are very, I guess, kind of solitary. Maybe they’re a little bit intellectual pursuits,” he says. “It’s not easy running an animal sanctuary, I’ll tell you that. And the rare book business, there’s not too many billionaire rare book dealers. The pursuit of finding a book that’s 500 years old and finding it at the right price, and being able to put it through auction or find a buyer for it … but it’s also that it’s a beautiful object, isn’t it? It’s 500 years old. I always think about who owned it. It’s survived all these wars and famines. If you buy a 500-year-old work of art, it’s probably $30 million, but this, you might get one for $500, but you’ve still got this beautiful object in your hand.”

Jennings is now two years into van life, and has one year remaining on his contract with the Giants, but there could be changes afoot. He’s told himself that if they win the premiership, he will live in a boat. And they’re a better than good chance: most bookmakers have them as second favourites, behind only the Swans, and if they beat the Bulldogs on Sunday in their final home-and-away fixture, they could finish as high as second on the ladder.

It’s been a strange season for the Giants. They won their first five games, and then only three of their next 10, but are now rolling on the back of a seven-game winning streak, making them arguably the form team of the competition.

“Kingers always sets up his season to be playing your best footy now,” Jennings says. “But everybody internally will say, well, we haven’t done anything yet. All we’ve done is qualify for top four, and while that’s an achievement, unless you win the big one, no one really cares.”

So in an ideal world, come the end of September, Jennings will be on the move.

“I’ve done the van life, but I’d love to just be in one of the marinas around here somewhere, and I’ll just live in a boat for a year,” he says. “I just like those sorts of things.”
 
The man that pops his shoulder every game, on sen Sydney breakfast radio this morning.

As with news articles, I clicked on the interview link a number of times to make it appear more popular 😉

Breakfast with Vossy

Wake up to the best sports talk in Sydney with Andrew Voss and Greg 'Brandy' Alexander on 1170 SEN.
www.sen.com.au www.sen.com.au
 
Last edited:
Colonial said:
www.gwsgiants.com.au

AFL 360: Adam Kingsley

Adam Kingsley joins AFL 360 to ahead of our 2024 finals campaign.
www.gwsgiants.com.au www.gwsgiants.com.au
Click to expand...
Fascinating stats from that interview:

Teams that finished 4th since 2000

Premierships - nil
Grand Finals - 3
Preliminary Finals - 19
Straight sets exit - 4

Two of those four preliminary finalists were us - 2016 and 2017.
 

Remove this Banner Ad

News Giants in the Media

Similar threads

The Dr
Podcast Historic AFL podcast: The build of the GWS Giants
Replies
3
Views
180
GWS Goose
GWS Goose
GWS Goose
Opinion The Giants best 22
Replies
22
Views
930
Colonial
Colonial
steviewonder36
Anyone collect Giants Membership Lanyards and Caps?
Replies
4
Views
206
Colonial
Colonial
ClockworkOrange
Analysis Umpiring Department vs Giants - Please explain, Laura Kane
Replies
16
Views
377
BarryAglett
BarryAglett
Colonial
Women's Footy VFLW Giants Thread
Replies
18
Views
877
MelbourneGWS
M
PaythePerryman
GIANT rivals
Replies
17
Views
1K
Brave New World
B
Land of the Giants
Preview First Semi-Final – GWS Giants vs Brisbane Lions, Saturday September 14, 7.40pm AEST, Engie Stadium
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
135
Views
3K
Colonial
Colonial

Remove this Banner Ad

Back
Top