Several key figures in St Kilda’s football department will explore different roles in the Saints' opening JLT Community Series game on Thursday night, with Midfield Performance and Development Coach, Adam Kingsley, set to take the senior coaching reins from Alan Richardson.
Kingsley, 41, has been part of the coaching setup at Linen House Centre since the end of 2010 and is considered by many in the industry as a senior coaching in waiting.
With Kingsley overseeing proceedings against Port Adelaide at Etihad Stadium, Richardson will obtain a different perspective from ground level, while Assistant Coach, Simon McPhee, will fill take control of the midfield.
Kingsley, a 2004 premiership player with the side he will coach against this week, expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to take control for the first time.
“Obviously I haven’t had the opportunity before so I’m very grateful for that,” Kingsley said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s a good opportunity for many of our people; Simon McPhee will take over the midfield and that will be his first time doing that.
“‘Richo’ gets a great opportunity to sit on the bench and get a feel for the players coming on and off the ground and the people down there working.
“I noticed that they’ve got quite a strong line-up as well so I’m expecting a really good clash. We’ll be looking forward to it.”
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Kingsley acknowledged the heightened expectations on the Saints this year, after the club finished just outside the finals on percentage in 2016, but said St Kilda had to improve the defensive side of their game if they are to take the next step in 2017.
“We were reasonably happy with our season last year,” Kingsley said. “We’ve identified some issues that potentially kept us outside the eight, so we’ve spent the summer working on those sorts of things.
“We felt like our offense was reasonably good last year, but we need to improve our defence so we’ve worked on that and our stoppages we can improve them as well.
“The external expectations are there but we can’t really control them, we’ll just try to do our jobs to the best of our abilities and see where it takes us.
“We acknowledge that we’ve still got some work to do to be a consistently competitive team in this and we know it’s going to be a very competitive season; there are a lot of teams who are probably fancying themselves to be really competitive.”
