The Rookie Draft is long gone and the National Draft was three months ago.

The NAB Challenge is still a few weeks off in the distance so the junior competitions must still be a while away.

So what do AFL recruiters do during the summer?

Collingwoodfc.com.au caught up with Dominic Milesi, the club’s National Recruiting Manager – Performance Analysis, who explained the work done by recruiters behind the scenes during the warmer months.

What happens after the National and Rookie Drafts are completed?

“Straight after the drafts we normally do a full review of every player that got drafted and rookied for every club,” Milesi says.

“We’ll have a presentation to our footy department for our draftees as footballers and people. We then review all the other picks, too, and write up profiles so the coaches can refer to them in the following year.

“We go back and review previous drafts, as well, to see anything we can improve on.”

The job doesn’t sleep

“We have already interviewed 25 kids for this year’s draft and we started our first interview the day after the Rookie Draft,” Milesi says with a smile.

Full-time recruiting is a full on job.

One minute you might be watching a TAC Cup match, the next you’ll be flying across the nation to take in a WAFL fixture.

Suddenly it’s midway through the week and there are school games to watch, tapes to review and reports to file.

Recruiters chase the leather Sherrin across the country and occasionally the globe in the hunt for the next big thing.

“The first game of footy we’ll go to is on 14 February in South Australia and pretty much from then on we’ll be there every Saturday and Sunday, watching football games until October,” Milesi says.

“The only time we can take time off is in parts of December and January. We stagger it so we’ve always got staff members in the office, so we’re all taking leave over different times.

“It’s important it’s the only time to get away with our family and our weekends back to catch up with friends because during the season can be pretty hectic.”

Globe trotting

Recruiting takes the game’s talent scouts off Australian shores.

In 2015, the AFL Academy spent much of January in the United States for a high performance training camp.

“Derek Hine (General Manager of List Management) and Matt Rendell (National Recruiting Manager – Talent Identification) went to the States for the Academy tour,” Milesi continues.

“It’s a much better chance to meet the kids and have in depth interviews with them see how they’re handling the foreign environment.

“This group of players gets selected by a set of AFL recruiters and the AFL talent manager, and then they go to America for 12 days for camp.

“In the last two years, 70 per cent of that group has been drafted.

“The purpose of the camp is more about doing really high intensity training as an elite group as well as a lot of fitness training to build up a good base for the 2015 season.

“This is first time they have held it in January rather than in April, which in the past has eaten into their season.

“There’s also been two AFL Academy club placement weeks, so we’ve had four kids train with us (Geelong Falcons Rhys Mathieson and Charlie Curnow trained with Collingwood in early January) and in addition to that we’ve gone and watched other AFL Academy kids training with other clubs.”

Long-term vision

The football public hears plenty about the best prospects from the National Under 18 Championships each year.

But how early do the recruiters start watching the youngsters? How, and when, do they keep their focus on those rising through beneath the under 18s?

“It’s nearly all under-18s during the year,” says Milesi.

“As soon as the Rookie Draft is finished we do a quick review and then immediately start focusing on the 2015 National Draft, starting a couple of days afterwards.

“The kids we’ve interviewed so far are mostly those from the AFL or Vic Metro academies and it’s been a combination of doing quite a few home visits. These will be the first of probably three to four interviews with these players, depending on the level of interest during the year.

“At this stage it looks like Vic Country going to be quite strong based on its numbers in the AFL Academy but that can change really quickly.

So you watch a lot of TAC Cup footy, but do you ever get a chance to watch the AFL?

“We see Collingwood play live probably seven or eight times per year,” Milesi says of his fellow recruiters.

“Plus I try and see the VFL around that many times as well. If not, we’ll watch them on tape as soon as we get home, and we try and watch a bit of training, too, at this time of year.

“We often try and catch an AFL night match as well, to help us keep track of opposition players and trends in the game.

“You like to go out when the new boys start training to see how they have assimilated into the group and how they’re handling the training loads, but at the same time, once we’ve selected them, we hand them over to the coaches and they take on the responsibilities.”

Did you know there’s a whole other team to recruit for?

It’s not just the AFL team that the recruiters look out for.

Two recruiters sit on Collingwood’s VFL list management committee.

“It means we’re involved in recruiting and scouting for the VFL list as well.

“We had almost 50 at training when they started back in December, and they’re all competing for 21 spots.

“Most of them are invitees whom we’ve seen in school, TAC or local footy. From then on a lot of it goes on a combination of what the coaches think.

“We watch the VFL team train and also try to balance the list up to make sure we’ve got a variety of positions covered.

“When then have ongoing list management committee meetings where players are discussed and further opportunities come up. We’re obviously coming towards the end of our final selection process as we near the practice match time.”

“Every player signed has been canvassed and interviewed, then discussion is had over whether we sign them or not,” fellow National Recruiting Assistant Adam Shepard adds from across the room.

“It’s always along the lines of the profiling of the list requirements.”