Plenty of heads were turned in the Gippsland football community late last year when Yallourn-Yallourn North signed Adam Bailey as their new coach.
Bailey was coming off two brilliant seasons in which he had helped Morwell win consecutive senior premierships in the high-standard Gippsland League. On top of that, he was the reigning GL best and fairest.
But after playing more than 200 games for the Tigers, the 29-year-old midfielder was ready for a new challenge. And it's fair to say he took on a big one.
Yallourn-Yallourn North were in the opposite spot to Morwell. The Bombers had recently finished on the bottom of the Mid Gippsland league ladder for the second year running. Their senior team had won just two games in two years.
But Bailey's arrival, and the accompanying recruiting drive that netted around a dozen more ready-made senior players, seemed to turn the struggling club around overnight.
"We started to get 55 to 60 players at pre-season training," Yallourn-Yallourn North's long-serving president Rohan Bounds said. "We thought, 'Geez, this is a bit of a turn-up.' Last year we were getting 15 or 20."
Six months on from those early sessions under Bailey's astute guidance, Yallourn-Yallourn North is a club reborn.
The Bombers have turned around their on-field fortunes to the extent that they were on top of the ladder, with an 8-1-1 record, prior to Saturday's away game at Trafalgar.
It's all happening off the field as well.
"We've probably almost doubled the value of our sponsorships from where they've been for the past 10 years," Bounds said.
"We've got more members. And we've got a club that's called the Bandwagon Bombers. They all put in a nice amount of money, in the hundreds of dollars.
"We were expecting to get 10 of them this year, and we ended up getting 25."
Yallourn-Yallourn North haven't tasted premiership success at any level for almost two decades. The senior side claimed their most recent flag in 1996, while the reserves haven't won since '94.
The club made the senior finals as recently as 2011, but endured some long afternoons during 2013 and '14.
"We just could never recruit the right player," Bounds said. "If we needed a ruckman, we'd end up with two backmen wanting to play for us.
"But off the field was always great. We've already had good support at our social functions, and our committee has always been strong."
Indeed, Bounds is in his eighth year as president, while the treasurer, his wife Narelle, and the secretary, Kyme Hayes, have been on the executive for just as long.
At the end of last season, the committee members agreed that a high-profile coach was needed to drag the club out of its malaise. They could hardly believe their luck when Bailey agreed to spearhead the revival.
"He'd had offers from other clubs," Bounds said. "But he didn't want to go to a club where everything was ready-made. He wanted to come to us and make something.
"He's been the perfect type of person for our club."
Even though the recruiting drive created a buzz around the club, Bounds was careful to keep his expectations in check.
As he recalled: "I said to Adam at the start of the year, 'All you need to do is win two games. That will be a 100 per cent improvement.'
"He was pretty confident that we could win more than two, but I don't think either of us quite expected what has happened."
Bailey's team lost its opening game away to Yinnar, but since then has beaten each of its other rivals. And the coach has won plenty of praise for his professional approach.
"He has implemented some game-plans and things that we'd never seen before," Bounds said.
"He's a calculated coach. He does a lot of homework, and he's recruited four blokes to be assistant coaches. They work as line coaches for him.
"Before this we were lucky to have one assistant."
The Bombers were out to continue their surge last weekend when they took on Yinnar at home in a battle between first and second on the ladder. The game went down to the wire, and the scoreboard showed Yallourn-Yallourn North down by five points when Tim Phillips was awarded a free kick within range just before the final siren.
Phillips sparked wild celebrations by putting his kick straight through the middle, but when the goal umpires checked their cards it turned out the scoreboard was wrong and the game had finished in a draw.
A shift-worker at the Hazelwood Power Station, Bounds missed the game and the ensuring pandemonium.
But he is quietly confident that there will be plenty of good times ahead as the finals near.
"Our expectation is that we can finish in the top five," he said. "We're not thinking any further than that."
YALLOURN-YALLOURN NORTH FNC
The combined population of the Yallourn North township and the district that is known as Yallourn is about 1700.
The Bombers have won four senior premierships in the Mid Gippsland league: 1986-87, 1993, 1996.
By Adam McNicol