Herald Sun | THE Leongatha Parrots were looking for a playing coach, the sort of player that Beau Vernon used to be, who reads the play better than others and who senses when teammates need to lift.
The club had ended another poor year, the second in a row, by missing the 2014 finals in the Gippsland Football League.
The slump dated back to 2012, a season of two acts, the before and after. An on-field accident had changed everything, yet no one grasped what was lost at first, except the victim.
The dominance of that first half of the season was lost to bedside vigils and charity drives.
By finals time, the Parrots seemed fogged in disbelief. Their best player had learned to breathe and swallow, but he would not be what he was.
The team lost the preliminary final by one point.
Vernon sat in his wheelchair on the sidelines of last year's final home and away game. He did not like what he saw.
Good players were down; they did not look to be relishing the game. Others who had starred in previous years were elsewhere. The supporter base seemed low.
He thought about it for 24 hours.
He spoke to his wife Lucy and his mum and dad.
He rang club president Mal Mackie the following day and posed a simple question: "If I apply for the coach's job, will you take me seriously?"
Mackie said he would. By the Thursday, Vernon rang back. He was ready.
Mackie says: "We always wanted Beau as a coach and we thought he would coach us one day, but not in these circumstances."
Vernon compiled folders for each of the five-member interview panel.
He had spoken to players he hoped to lure back. Tas Clingan was the best and fairest winner in 2012. Cade Maskelle kicked 80 goals in winning the same award the following year, while Dale Hoghton had been playing VFL for five-odd years. They liked Vernon's spiel, as did Tristan Francis, whose own playing orbit had been limited only by injury. Vernon wanted Francis as an assistant coach.
Vernon had a plan that embraced the best player in the firsts as well as the weakest in the under-16s. He sought to lift the club's social buzz and reinvent its on-field game structures. Footballers needed to "enjoy" the game again, especially the juniors.
He was nervous, though it's doubtful it showed — he has had plenty of practice with public speaking in recent years.
If his handshake was limp, it didn't matter. Over a two-and-a-half hour interview, he dazzled. Five had applied for the coach's job.
"It wasn't because it was Beau Vernon," Mackie said of the 26-year-old's appointment. "It wasn't because we felt sorry for him. He was the best candidate."
VERNON has limited function in his fingers.
This does not slow the emails he sends to officials before training — about training — each Tuesday and Thursday. Nor had it impaired the movements of the nametags for Dogga, Ecca, Besty and Westy on the magnetic footy oval board in Vernon's Hughesdale apartment. Let's not overlook Smacka, Dimmy, Rooster and Chumma.
There are endless videos, and the game plans he mulls over with wife Lucy. She good-naturedly rolls her eyes at the routines of recent months.
There are the constant phone calls, to his brother Zak and father Daryl, a former AFL player at Richmond and Sydney. Many of the calls are made in the car during the long drives to and from Leongatha.
The freedom to drive himself for more than year now has helped a lot — he no longer feels so reliant on others. He uses a column shift, which he pulls down to accelerate and pushes in to brake.
"How do you feel about me driving?" Vernon asked a passenger the other day. "Are you nervous?"
He now takes less than a minute to take off a T-shirt. His arms and chest muscles are a patchwork of strengths and sensations. Once, the T-shirt used to take four minutes.
His normal is a case study in adaptation. With no fuss, he claws, pokes and sometimes bites to achieve what he once did without thinking. His normal is about being broken and putting himself back together.
It is pursuing the same ideals he always had, under far more imposing limits, and it still means being ticked off by Lucy, a high school sweetheart, for not cleaning up after himself at home.
Vernon has a patience that once defied him and a purpose that, a few years ago, he was yet to fulfil. He was always driven. If he wasn't playing footy as a kid, he was watching it on TV or "knocking down his door" to get Zak to have a kick.
Events may have been unkind, but they have, he says, "made me mature a bit more".
It seems normal for a former star player to coach a country club where there are utes in the carpark and committee men fret about finances.
It's natural that Vernon being paralysed from the chest down on a footy field numbed all who cared for him and the club. What's surprising is this — less than three years later, Vernon is Leongatha's great new hope.
Vernon cannot be what he was; happily, he is not trying to be. He accepts his wasted limbs. He wishes it was different — every day, he admits — but he has honed those talents that nature spared. His will to win, his football analysis and dedication, lies beneath a country-boy charm and reflexive smile.
"Once I heard he was coaching I wanted to play for him," says co-captain Maskelle. "He's inspiring. The club couldn't be in better hands." Assistant coach, Paul Le Page, sums up a wider assumption. "Leadership comes very easily to him," he says.
No one thinks it will be easy. Goodwill does not translate into good footy, and the flip side to hope is expectation. Vernon is happy to speak of finals, but sensibly does not commit to specifics. The Parrots have finished seventh over the past two seasons, and have not won a flag since 2001.
Vernon had been preparing for yesterday's game against Traralgon for weeks. He offered selected players at Thursday night's training detailed analysis about Traralgon's ruck options, likely defensive tactics, midfield tendencies and the coach's style. The permutations seemed endless.
Vernon buzzed around the ground in an electric chair with rubberised wheels. He was hard on the whistle and quick with his thoughts.
He told the players he was "bloody excited" about Saturday's game, then cracked a joke against his own disability that was politically incorrect and uproariously funny. He ordered push-ups because half the blokes, in a "p--s-poor effort", had not introduced themselves to a new player. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
His trickiest moment was behind closed doors. He told players they missed selection.
"One of them was in my bridal party," Vernon says. "It was pretty tough going."
Yesterday, of course, was the first major test of many.
Vernon admitted he was as toey as any playing day, when he would vomit, almost as a ritual, from self-imposed pressure. The Parrots kicked the first goal, then the next, then the next. The result was clear by half-time, but Vernon remained a considered voice from his raised chair throughout. He grasps the ups and downs of football better than anyone.
VERNON'S long-term plan first fragmented in 2006. The dream was simple enough, the same imaginings that play in so many backyards. Yet his hopes of an AFL career were within reach.
The previous September, he was at 16 the youngest player in the Gippsland Power team playing the Dandenong Stingrays in the TAC Cup (under-18) final. Many from that game would play AFL, including Vernon's teammate Scott Pendlebury.
Vernon seemed set to be one of them. His style has been likened to Pendlebury, a future Brownlow Medallist: so unhurried yet so sharp.
Football, we all know, is a bastard. For every Pendlebury, there are dozens of discards.
Nature was always double-edged for Vernon. His physical prowess presented him a roomful of schoolboy trophies.
Yet at aged five, he had stopped breathing on the way to a Christmas dinner. He had tuberculosis and a mandarin-sized lump near his heart.
His mother has little more than theory to link the strong TB drugs to the derailment of her son's AFL aspirations. It's as good an explanation as any for the odd sequence of knee, thumb and groin injuries to his teenage body.
He remembers the tearing of knee tendons in the first practice match of 2006. Running backwards with the flight of the ball, he was skittled from the side. As he lay there, writhing, he thought that this was not supposed to be, that this was meant to be the year he was drafted to the AFL.
Vernon was washed up as an AFL prospect before he could vote. He "couldn't sit still". He played with Casey in the VFL, then at Phillip Island, then Leongatha lured him.
He started a commerce degree, then deferred it because he couldn't imagine an office job. He was painting houses for work and surfing in summer. The constants were Lucy and football.
On June 23, 2012, Vernon crumpled to the ground and never got up. His head was over the ball when a Wonthaggi player ran through. The game had seemed set to be called off: heavy rains had flooded roads and Lucy, in Melbourne, had joked that Vernon would need a helicopter to see her that night. They have since laughed, somehow, about how she was right.
No one seemed willing to grasp what they were witnessing, not when Vernon yelled that he could not feel his legs, and not when a trainer repeated it to spectators. "He'll be right," thought then fellow player, Paul Le Page. Mackie, on the sidelines, assumed it was an unusual twinge. "It won't be anything," he thought. "It'll be all good."
The footage depicts a clumsy bump. Vernon's limbs cocked, then collapsed, as he lay on the ground. His head lolled. His neck was cracked, his spinal cord squeezed; the X-ray of vertebrae C5 and C6 resembles a dog-legged river on a map. He felt pins and needles. He knew nothing about paralysis, but he was "s--ting himself". "I don't want to be like this," he shouted.
Zak Vernon was playing that day. Briefly, he figured his older brother had been knocked out — again. "He was asked what his pain was out of 10 and he said '10' straight away so I knew it was pretty serious," Zak says. "It was a pretty hard day, that."
Lucy recalls "survival mode — tomorrow, then tomorrow, then tomorrow". Hopes for the return of movement proved mostly misplaced.
Vernon was reminded on TV of what he could no longer do. He cried himself to sleep some nights, yet always woke fresh. He gave a media interview about football clubs and insurance, and he now works three days a week for the AFL in risk management. It wasn't what he said but what he projected — not a hint of self-pity.
Quadriplegia costs were bandied about — $3 million to $5 million. An opposition club, Morwell, handed over a match-day gate. Vernon flinched at the outpourings of support, touching as they were.
"I didn't want to know about it," he says. "I'm a pretty proud bloke. I appreciated it but I really struggled with it. It's hard to accept other people's money. I still don't like talking about it, to be honest."
HIS lack of self-consciousness was apparent from the first website videos he posted. He wrote with humour of difficulties with the most basic bodily functions. It was his form of thank-you.
In 2013, Vernon had an advisory role from the interchange bench. In the first Parrots' game, an opponent tried "to rip off" his brother's head, and Vernon burned with a bystander's helplessness.
The yearning to play again has struck him only in the past week. He longs for the kinship of the physical challenge. He always "just wanted to get out there and play footy".
Accident or not, as pointed out by many locals, Vernon was about due to coach Leongatha. The plan had him being a player-coach. As he says, plans in the past "just haven't worked for me", but the plans that matter have formed since the accident: kids, public speaking, a life in the country. If Vernon is less than he was, he is also more because of it.
Daryl and Lucy agreed recently that they no longer notice Vernon's wheelchair. It's not complicated, anymore: if he needs a hand, you help.
"You don't want to accept it, but there's no sense in dwelling on it," Daryl says.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.