Of all the players and coaches at the club, only Nathan Buckley predates Anthony Rocca as a Collingwood person.
 
There’s Merchandise Manager Simon Prestigiacomo, who started at Victoria Park a year prior to Rocca, but aside from ‘Bucks’ and ‘Presti’, no one knows the Collingwood experience like the 242-game forward.
 
That knowledge and respect helped Rocca become the Defensive Development Coach last November after two seasons of being a part-time mentor to the club’s key position prospects in the VFL.
 
Initially, Rocca hadn’t entertained the idea of becoming a coach, but once the curtains were drawn on his career, the situation changed.
 
“When I was playing, I didn’t take much of an interest in coaching because I knew how full on the coaching caper was back then,” Rocca explained.
 
“Once I retired I had the NFL gig over in America where I had a tryout with the New York Giants. They wanted me to come back and do a pre-season but I had a really good think about it. I’ve got my young family and I wasn’t really 100 percent committed, so it’s a big ask moving the whole family over and not really being 100% committed.
 
Click here to learn about Offensive Development Coach Mitch Hahn.

“I didn’t want to put my family though that and I didn’t want to put the New York Giants through that so I pretty much gave that the flick a couple of days after I had that tryout. Then I set my sights on coaching.”
 
It’s led, in a roundabout way, to his full time role at Collingwood. Now armed with his Level Two coaching accreditation, Rocca is responsible for six key position players with whom he works closely. He says he is enjoying his new role, but forecasts growing into a more senior assistant role in the years to come.
 
“At the moment I’m pretty happy in my role. There’s a bit of pressure on us development guys to keep our guys on the improve. The senior coaching roles have some really full on pressure so I don’t really want that sort of role at the moment. I might find in a couple of years time that I might grow into that.
 
“I’m happy with the group that we’ve got and the chemistry we’ve got working together. It’s a pretty fun and relaxed sort of environment, but we know when to be firm and demand a bit from each other which is really good.”
 
Rocca not only demands high standards from his fellow coaches but his players, too.
 
“I just want high standards,” he emphasised.
 
“A player’s got to have high standards when they come to the footy club. The more they want to learn, the more they’re going to achieve. The way they set themselves up with the standards they create is going to be more beneficial than what we can teach them.”

Click here to hear from Midfield Development Coach Dale Tapping.

Development of individual players has multiplied in recent years, and is conducted with far greater detail than what Rocca and others received when he first arrived at the club from Sydney in 1997.
 
“It’s just grown 10 fold. We only had Tony Shaw and three assistants. For those guys to devote all their time to 40-odd blokes was pretty hard,” Rocca pondered.
 
“A lot of the learning was from players themselves, which really isn’t a bad thing to keep each other accountable. You can get through the cracks a fair bit though. Now the players are really held accountable to coaches, and to themselves. The best way of learning is to create an environment to have an expectation and a standard that a player must hold themselves to.”
 
That level of accountability ensures that players such as Jarrod Witts, Lachlan Keeffe and Jonathon Ceglar have squeezed plenty out of the pre-season. But as Rocca cautioned, form on the track counts for naught when the games begin.
 
“We can all be pre-season champions, but until you have match practice and go out there on the footy field and really apply what you’ve learned during the pre-season…it (the result of a footballer’s work) is the great unknown.
 
“They’re working hard, they know the standards, they know their roles, they know their positioning, they know the set plays and things like that but under the heat of the battle it’s something different.
 
“Our first faze of teaching these kids is just about to finish. Our next teaching phase is under the heat of the moment.”
 
Several youngsters are putting their hands up to be a part of that next phase. One of the most intriguing is Witts, who has generated a lot of interest since his exciting VFL debut late last season.
 
“I don’t want to put too much on the young kid, but he is (exciting),” said Rocca.
 
“He’s still 18.  In different areas he’s advanced. For an 18-year-old, who’s six-foot 10, I haven’t seen a better ground level player than him at that age, and for that height. But obviously there are areas of his game that he has to improve.

See the full list of Collingwood coaches for 2012 here.

“At Collingwood, if they’re a defensive player, we still try and show them all aspects of forward line and the midfield so if a Lachlan Keeffe can go forward after playing in the backline he needs to know the roles. One thing we preach at Collingwood is that knowing your role is crucial.
 
“All of them have shown signs but all of them have a long way to go. I’m sure that some of them could have good, long careers.”
 
What Rocca is looking to impart is his knowledge of the game’s intricacies which are specific to key position players at both ends of the ground. By the end of his career, Rocca was considered to be one of the smarter forwards in one-on-one situations, and believes that all the things that often go unnoticed often help transform a key position player’s game.
 
“I look at body positioning. How to use your body and how to get to a good spot. Also the techniques of spoiling, of marking, of goal kicking, all those little things.
 
“Being a forward who coaches defenders does help a little because I can show them ways of where the forward wants to lead or the body positioning a forward likes to have.
 
“I’m probably 15kg heavier than most of them, and some players are going to come up against guys who are 105kg-110kg so that means that they’re able to put their practice onto me to simulate other players.”
 
A deep thinker, Rocca admits that the coaching position does come with challenges unique to a person with such experience within the football club.
 
“It’s probably a little bit daunting. Sometimes I think about whether in 2-3 years time I’m working at a different club, it’s a bit daunting to come into a new environment.
 
“At this stage, I’m really happy with things. I’ve got a good understanding of a lot of the players here because I played with them and some I’ve known for a while, so it’s good in that sense but hopefully I can tag along and be a mentor to some of these kids who I’m with at the moment.”
 
For a former teammate of several players, the need to confront his friends with a hard word or two may appear confronting. Instead, Rocca argues that it works in his favour.
 
“I think it’s sometimes to my benefit.
 
“If they can respect me with my coaching the way they did when I was playing, then it should be pretty easy.”
 
If respect is a measuring stick of success, Rocca is set to go a long way within the coaching caper.