"He's like a second Dad to me, to be fair."
That's how Caulfield Grammar midfielder Harper McCullough describes Jimmy Bartel. A Brownlow medallist, three-time premiership player, and now a fixture at Caulfield's football program. It's the kind of line that, a decade ago, wouldn't have been said about a school football coach. Now it barely raises an eyebrow.
Bartel isn't an outlier. He's the local face of a competition-wide shift that has quietly changed what it means to coach, and to play, school football in Victoria.
Across the Associated Public Schools (APS) competition, former AFL players and staff have moved into school programs in numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
Rodney Eade has taken up a director of football role at Scotch College. Melbourne Grammar has installed former Fitzroy and St Kilda player Brad Gotch as head of football, while Ryley Sanders and Heath Shaw have both been spotted around the program.
Brighton Grammar has former Melbourne forward Jake Melksham refining the craft of its talent pool. At Caulfield, alongside Bartel, sits Steven Morris, who brings AFL coaching experience from his time at Richmond.
Across the competition, this is now standard.
As has been highly publicised, Haileybury has Matthew Lloyd coaching the firsts, with Scott Pendlebury as his assistant and Cale Hooker also on staff.
Scotch College has Rodney Eade as director of football.
Xavier College is coached by Jobe Watson, alongside Jack Silvagni, Oscar Brownless and Carlton great Marc Murphy.
Melbourne Grammar has had Heath Shaw and Ryley Sanders around the program, with Brad Gotch as head of football and Leigh Clarke coaching the side.
St Kevin's has Daniel Harford and Henry Playfair in its coaching structure, with North Melbourne's George Wardlaw working through the junior program.
Carey Grammar is coached by John Barker, with Tom Mitchell also involved this year.
Geelong College has Adam Cooney, alongside full-time head of football Nathan Brown and Wesley College has David Mirra as firsts coach.
The logic is straightforward. AFL-calibre coaching is now a genuine differentiator in a competition where every school has access to good facilities and a talented playing pool.
It's worth stating plainly how lopsided this pipeline has become.
The 11 APS schools make up a fraction of one per cent of Victorian secondary schools, yet they account for roughly a quarter of all AFL draftees in a given year.
Caulfield alone produced 19 AFL-listed players by 2019, Haileybury with 20. Those figures sit alongside school fees in the tens of thousands of dollars a year and a reality that fuels an ongoing, legitimate debate about access and privilege in a code that has long marketed itself as classless.
That's a separate conversation to the one about culture on the ground, but it's the backdrop against which all of this professionalisation is happening.
It's also, whether schools say it aloud or not, a recruiting tool, for the football program first, and for full-fee enrolments more broadly.
What's notable talking to the players is how little of this reads as marketing to them.
McCullough doesn't talk about Bartel's medal count, but rather he talks about a man who "would stop to talk to anyone... he'd stop to talk to a dog."
Morris, he says, is valued less for a coaching line than for "teaching the boys different things" drawn from real AFL experience.
Caulfield captain Ben Forster, described his own promotion to the leadership group as one that doesn't credit a program or a system but rather a credit to relationships built slowly, over a rough pre-season, with "all the boys."
That distinction matters. The infrastructure is new and increasingly professional. The way it's experienced by the young students and players inside it is still, at its core, personal.
While it has become commonplace, Caulfield and Brighton just happen to be doing it in front of the biggest crowd of the year.
