By Marcus Uhe
If Narre Warren needs any extra motivation to add yet another premiership to its bulging trophy cabinet at Kalora Park, the potential to finish Shane Dwyer’s coaching tenure on the best possible note will undoubtedly provide an additional layer of incentive.
The Magpies announced on Friday that current assistant Steven Kidd will replace Dwyer as senior coach in 2024, after four years as the main man.
The reigning premiership coach said a combination of factors led to the decision.
“Four years in, four or five years is generally enough for a senior coach,” Dwyer explained.
“I would have loved to keep going, but this injury has knocked me around a bit, and with work and family, I let the club know that I wasn’t going to go on.
“Getting through Covid-19 and this year has been enough for me.
“I think it’s the right time to move on.”
A successful player at Narre Warren in his own right, Dwyer made the leap from steering the under-19 group to the seniors in 2020 before Covid-19 curtailed the next 24 months.
Seeing players he coached in the Under 19s make the leap to senior football with great success, including Tom Miller, Tom Toner and Peter Gentile, ranks among his proudest achievements, along with steering the club through the tumult that came with Covid-19, last year’s flag, and the connections formed throughout both programs of the Magpies’ operation.
“We all get on really well and that’s been the best part, the relationships,” he said.
“We’re not too serious, we joke around a fair bit and have a good time.
“The best thing about coaching is the relationships you form, and seeing the improvement in guys that you’ve coached.
“To be coaching, the last two years, guys who have won league medals, has been pretty good.”
No stranger to the Magpies’ setup and culture, Kidd won three premierships in his 259 games as a player in black and white and is currently in his third stint as an assistant, returning to the Magpies’ nest after four years at Warragul in the Gippsland League where he won Senior Coach of the Year and AFL Gippsland Coaches Coach of the Year in 2016.
Kidd said he didn’t need much convincing to take on the role, once Dwyer informed the coaching group that 2023 would be his final year.
“It’s always something I wanted to do, it was a little bit of a question of timing, but I think the opportunity with the players that we have in the side and the group that we’ve got together, it would be great to keep that together and keep building, and hopefully create more success,” Kidd said.
“I had a bit to weigh up as far as work and family life goes, but in the end I thought it was the right time for me.”
Dwyer has every faith in his assistant’s ability to take the head coaching position, given his prior success at Warragul and his pre-established relationships with the current playing list.
“I would have struggled without him in my tenure as coach, he’s been there the whole time as well,” he said of Kidd.
“Tactically he’s very good, I’ll tap into him a fair bit during the game, generally at breaks to see what he thinks before I go and have a chat with them.
“I think he’ll do a fantastic job and hopefully having a coach from within will help us maintain as many as we can.”
Having taken the field with Dwyer as a teammate back in their playing days, before becoming close mates away from football, Kidd said it would “mean everything” to cap off his tenure with another premiership.
“To get to where he’s got to, I think he’s coaching better than he ever has,” Kidd said.
“I spent so many years playing with him, we played a couple of hundred games at Narre Warren and then forged a great friendship through that and it continues on.
“We’ve involved in Punters clubs, golf groups, so we’re quite close, and the fight he’s shown in the past year, to send him off with back-to-back premierships would be quite emotional.”
