Max Mapley grew up spending his Saturday mornings at the home of the Jindalee Jaguars.
Wearing the blue and gold of a club formed all the way back in 1977, he was one of hundreds who dreamed of becoming the Jaguars second AFL player.
It’s been a long wait for a club which in recent years has been one of Brisbane’s more progressive, especially in the women’s and junior girls’ space.
Not since Trevor Spencer, who played 44 games with Essendon, Melbourne and Geelong from 1985-91, has the club developed a player good enough to play at the elite level.
In what is part of a Jindalee history that many will not be aware of, 190cm Spencer debuted for Essendon under Kevin Sheedy in Round 18 1985, when they beat North Melbourne by 104 points.
Tim Watson kicked five goals and had 24 possessions and picked up three Brownlow Medal votes in his 185th game, playing alongside another Queenslander, Frank Dunell.
There were three future AFL coaches in a star-studded Essendon side which went on to complete back-to-back flags – Watson, Mark Thompson and Mark Harvey. And two future caretaker coaches in the North side – Darren Crocker and Donald McDonald.
Spencer played 31 games under Sheedy at Essendon from 1985-89, three games under John Northey in an injury-plagued stint at Melbourne in 1990-91, and after a mid-season move to Geelong in 1991, went quickly into the top side and played the last 10 games of the season.
His 44th and last game was in the 15-point 1991 preliminary final loss to West Coast which, coincidentally, was also full of future coaches.
In the Geelong side with Spencer were Mark Neeld and Garry Hocking, plus current Geelong CEO Steve Hocking, while the West Coast side included John Worsfold, Guy McKenna, Don Pyke and Scott Watters.
But at 26 Spencer’s knees were bad. He couldn’t play on at the elite level. He vanished from the AFL scene, although he returned to Geelong in 2004 to share match day running duties with ex-teammate Andrew Bews.
Mapley, whose name is pronounced map-lee – not mape-lee as some Melbourne media suggested, was born in Brisbane on 27 October 2005 to Tasmanian parents Jim and Sharon.
He began his football journey in the Jindalee Auskick program. He later played in Met-West representative sides and attended Jindalee State School and Indooroopilly High School.
He also played basketball and cricket in his junior days, but at 16 he fell off the Queensland football radar when he moved to Tasmania with younger brother Jacob after his parents decided to move home.
He played in the Tassie Devils Under-16s side and with Tasmania in the VFL Under 18 League, and last year was a member of the Clarence side coached by Grant Fagan, brother of Lions coach Chris Fagan, which won the Southern Football League premiership.
An athletic 200cm well-suited to the new ruck rules which have made jumping ruckmen a priority at AFL clubs, he has been a fixture this year in the Tasmanian Devils VFL side after playing in the expansion club’s first game in March.
He averaged 12.0 possessions, 18.1 hit-outs and 3.3 clearances in seven games with the Devils in what unknowingly was an audition for the AFL Mid-Season Draft.
And on Tuesday of last week (26 May), while watching training at Clarence on an ‘off’ night for the Devils, the quietly-spoken Mapley he was catapulted into the AFL.
He’d met with the Demons in a Hobart café a couple of weeks earlier but wasn’t given any guarantees and was only ‘hopeful’ ahead of the draft. “The only thing I knew was that if I was going to be picked up it would be Melbourne,” he explained.
The Tasmanians were up and about when Jason Artemis went #1 to Essendon. Mapley, following proceedings on the phone of a Devils teammate, noted that at #11 Melbourne took forward Lukas Cooke from SANFL club Woodville-West Torrens and at #16 nabbed Williamstown VFL midfielder Joel Fitzgerald.
At #17 Port Adelaide passed, and at #18 Collingwood took Coburg’s Mitch Podhajski.
There was only one pick left, but that was all it took. At #19 Melbourne claimed Mapley.
“It’s been a bit of a blur since then,” he said. “The first call I got was from (Melbourne coach) Steven King, who congratulated me and welcomed me to the club, and after that my phone blew up,” he recounted.
Reece Conca, a 150-game AFL player with Richmond and Fremantle and now the Demons’ player development manager and match day runner, met with Mapley and his parents in Hobart on the Wednesday morning and flew with him to Melbourne that afternoon.
He moved into an apartment in Richmond with Cooke, and on Saturday joined Cooke and Fitzgerald in the Casey side that, sitting towards the bottom of the VFL ladder with a 3-5 record, beat second-placed GWS Giants by 14 points at Casey Fields.
How many of his teammates did he know by name? “Not many,” he replied, probably understating a scenario which is the most chaotic in the AFL recruiting process.
It didn’t matter. A match report on the Casey website said: “Mapley (also) made his presence felt … Splitting his time between the forward line and the ruck, he provided a strong aerial target and delivered a crucial moment in the final quarter when he kicked Casey's opening goal of the term to draw the scores level.”
Mapley is the third ruckman at Melbourne named ‘Max’ after 209cm skipper Max Gawn and 204cm Max Heath, who was traded to the Demons last November after four games in five years at the Saints.
The club’s other ruckman is Kalani White, a 201cm graduate of the SUNS Academy and son of Jeff White, pick #1 overall in the 1994 AFL Draft and a 236-gamer at Fremantle and Melbourne who, after winning All-Australian selection and the Melbourne best & fairest in 2004, last week joined the Brisbane Lions AFLW program as an assistant-coach.
Kalani White joined the Demons via last year’s rookie draft as a priority father/son selection.