Matthew Nicks will return “home” this weekend a member of the enemy. But still he looks forward to catching up with Jarrad McVeigh.

While the pair will be in opposition camps on Sunday afternoon when the Sydney Swans host Port Adelaide at the SCG, with Nicks in the Port Adelaide coaches box and McVeigh playing for the Swans, all that will be forgotten for a couple of hours for two old mates to have a chat.

They are 10 years apart in age, but they share a special bond. And always will.

McVeigh, veteran of 301 Swans games, is the only player still on the club list who played with Nicks during his distinguished 175-game career at the SCG from 1996-2005.

When a 30-year-old Nicks played what turned out to be his last game for the Swans in Round 11 that year, McVeigh was a 20-year-old up-and-comer in his 28^th game.

Rarely when they find themselves in the same city do they fail to catch up.

Often there are others, too. Like Michael O’Loughlin, another long-time Nicks mate and likely catch-up candidate this week. And whenever they get together it’s as if it was yesterday they’d last been chatting.

It’s that special bond which is bred via extended periods at successful football clubs. And yet it could so easily have been entirely different.

Nicks, a soccer convert from South Australia who had played barely 50 games of Australian football of any kind when drafted by the Swans with selection #21 in the 1994 National Draft, could so very easily have gone elsewhere.

Had Sydney not traded Scott Watters to Fremantle for selection #21 ahead of the Draft it certainly would not have become a Swan. And if Adelaide had a pick earlier than #27 Nicks might have been a Crow.

“I’d spoken to the Crows prior to the Draft and they expressed some interest, which at the time would have been ideal. I was so young and so raw that the last thing I wanted to do was move to Sydney,” Nicks recalled this week.

That the Swans had been wooden-spooners in 1992, ’93 and ’94 and won eight of their last 64 matches didn’t exactly make the club a prime destination for a new draftee either. And he’d never even been to Sydney.

“In the end it turned out to be an absolute blessing. I loved every minute of my time in Sydney. As much as anything it was the life lessons you get when you move away from home,” he said.

“It’s an awesome footy club and Sydney is an awesome spot.”

While Adelaide ended up using selection #27 to draft Sturt midfielder Toby Kennett, who never played a senior game and went back to the SANFL 12 months later, Nicks was part of a massive influx of talent to the Swans and a huge success story.

In the ’94 National Draft the club took Anthony Rocca (#2), Shannon Grant (#3), Stuart Mangin (#20), Nicks, O’Loughlin (#40), Emil Parthenidis (#57), Troy Luff (#74) and Simon Arnott (#87), picked up Leo Barry, Justin Crawford and Tim Scott as zone selections, and signed Peter Craven as an uncontracted player choice from Fitzroy.

Also, there were two other handy pick-ups via the trade table and the Pre-Season Draft: Tony Lockett and Paul Roos.

“Mickey (O’Loughlin) and I used to joke about it .. we were the big four .. Plugger, Roosy and us,” said Nicks, who moved into a flat in Sydney with O’Loughlin and Arnott and “spent the next five years learning how to live”.

Nicks had plenty of learning to do. After a promising soccer career in which he’d spent some time  with Adelaide City and represented SA at junior level he’d played a bit of U17s and U19s football at West Adelaide, plus two League games, and then shared in West Adelaide’s 1994 Reserves flag with future Crows 300-gamer Tyson Edwards.

But late in his first week of training in the Harbour City, Nicks tried to tackle Swans strongman Dean McRae and broke his leg. It wasn’t entirely a new injury – he’d done the same thing to the other leg playing soccer in an accident which indirectly saw him switch codes – but it was the end of his first season in the AFL.

“That was probably the best thing that could have happened because it gave me a year to just watch and learn. I wasn’t ready. I’d only taken up footy two-and-a-half years earlier when I followed some mates down to West Adelaide because I couldn’t play soccer – I was as raw as could be.”

Finally Nicks made his AFL debut in Round 3, 1996 against Collingwood at the SCG. Lockett kicked eight goals and Sydney won by 34 points.

Memories? “I did what most first gamers did back then … I spent three quarters of the game on the bench. For my first touch I took a hanger on Scott Burns and remember thinking “this is pretty easy” which of course it wasn’t.

“I was rapt just to be out there .. I remember crumbing one under Plugger which was pretty good too … we had a good win ... otherwise it’s a bit of a blur.”

Nicks played Rounds 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9 in 1996 and was pretty much an emergency for the rest of the season as a largely unchanged side, coached by Rodney Eade and captained by Paul Kelly, went all the way to the grand final against North Melbourne.

They lost by 43 points but Nicks was up and away. Over the next eight years he was a senior fixture, He played 20, 24, 23, 19, 18, 21, 18 and 17 games, three times finished top 10 in the club championship – 5^th in 1998, 3^rd in 1989 and 8^th in 2001 – and was an integral part of a club that overhauled it’s entire football operation.

Sadly, just as he watched a grand final in his first year as an active player, he did so again in his last.

He’d played nine of the first 11 games in 2005, missing two through injury, before a knee problem eventually diagnosed as a stress fracture of the femur bone ended his career.

Time ran out on him in a desperate bid to get himself fit for one last finals assault, and he watched as his lifelong mates broke a 72-year premiership drought with a last-gasp win over West Coast in the ’05 grand final.

After 11 years at the SCG he left with nothing but good memories. “It was a fantastic time to be at the club … awesome. We were down and out at the start, so as a club we had to change a lot of things, and part of that from a player’s perspective meant going out to the community to try to build the game in Sydney.

“There was a lot of pushback – like we couldn’t get into the private schools and couldn’t get into the western suburbs because it was dominated by rugby league – but slowly we made progress.

“As a group we worked hard on what we stood for and how we wanted to play, and that was really the beginning of the ‘Bloods’ culture which started in 2005.

“Ever since then there’s been an aura associated with the club. It’s such a great football club. They’ve had their moments like the 0-6 start last year, but they’ve kept the culture growing. No other club disrespects the Swans because they are so good.”

Nicks said it was impossible to identify one person who drove things, but he did single out 1993-95 captain Stuart Maxfield. “He sort of started it, and year by year everyone bought in. It used to be a thing … how do you earn your stripes to become a Blood?

“It’s a non-negotiable set of standards, and even as an outsider now it’s still the same. Young blokes like (Dan) Hannebery and (Isaac) Heeney are superstars but they play with a real ferociousness that reminds me of all those years ago.”

While McVeigh is the only playing survivor from the Nicks days there are still a lot of familiar faces in coaching and off-field roles, like John Longmire, Maxfield, Dennis Carroll and Craig Holden.

As much as it was disappointing to go out without playing in the flag win, his time was up after the 2005 grand final loss. And he knew it. “I was done with footy. I’d got to the point where I didn’t love it any more, and I needed to find something else.”

He got his financial qualifications and worked as a stock-broker. Successfully so. But within 12 months his love of football had returned, and he took on senior coaching duties with the University of NSW, then playing in the Sydney grade competition.

“They were pretty raw back then. They didn’t know what defence was and they basically just ran and chased the footy. That was totally different to the culture I’d come from so I tried to change the way we went about things. I figured if you can make defence the first focus the rest will come. We weren’t as good as some sides but we did OK and I loved coaching.”

Among his first prodigies was a young Dane Rampe. “He was so raw and a little bit alternate. He wasn’t really a contested player at all and he was still learning the game. When I look at him today I think oh my lord – what a transformation!” he said.

After two years coaching part-time in Sydney and working as a stockbroker Nicks decided it was time to head home. He relocated his work life and took charge of the Scotch College First XVIII in Adelaide.

There he took much pride in coaching another young up and comer in Rory Laird. “He was playing a couple of years ahead of his age group but he was a superstar. And when I think back to blokes like Rampe and Laird, who are two of the best defenders in the competition, it’s what coaching is all about. I loved it.”

After two years at Scotch he joined Port Adelaide as a development coach in 2011 and graduated to the senior group in 2013. He served as backline coach from 2013-15, took charge of the forwards in 2016 and was officially appointed senior assistant coach in 2017 under Ken Hinkley.

What’s that mean? “Ken is the boss – I do whatever he wants – but basically I try to connect the whole thing up. I do our full ground defence and offence, and liaise with each of the line coaches to make sure we’re maximising everything we’re trying to do”.

It’s a highly credentialed panel, with ex-Brisbane Lions champion and senior coach Michael Voss in charge of the midfield, former Port premiership ruckman Brendon Lade overseeing the forward line, and ex-Melbourne and Adelaide defender turned back-to-back SANFL premiership coach Nathan Bassett running the backline.

Now 42 and busy at home with wife Courtney raising three-year-old Ethan, two-year-old Isla and nine-month-old Harry, Nicks will have monitored closely the progress of Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin, Carlton coach Brendon Bolton and new Gold Coast coach Stuart Dew.

Like Nicks, Goodwin, Bolton and Dew are graduates of the AFL’s 2015 Level Four coaching program, designed to best prepare young coaches for the progression to the top job.

Nicks, Goodwin, Bolton and Dew worked with Blake Caracella, Robert Harvey, John Barker, Adam Kingsley, Simon Lloyd and Robert Harvey.

They were chosen after a peer and senior coach review and interviews with former AFL coaches Peter Schwab and John Worsfold, Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou, hockey coach Ric Charlesworth, and AFL club chief executives Trevor Nisbett, Greg Swann, Peter Jackson and Brian Cook.

The course was created after the AFL had recognised there had been former players and assistants who took on senior roles without really being properly prepared.

The program was designed to fast-track the participants, and give them a broader view of all the responsibilities of a senior coach.

The program also aimed to give participants a broader view of the responsibilities of a senior coach. Four key components were core coaching modules, an individual learning plan, a program for high-impact leadership and individual coach mentoring.

Core modules addressed areas including rules, regulations, governance, integrity, government relations and the economy of the game, while other modules addressed quality coaching practice, strategic communications, media training and ethical leadership.

Nicks said the course was “fantastic” and “just what we needed” but despite flattering media reports suggesting he is a senior coach in waiting, he insists he is in no hurry.

“We’ve got a fantastic coaching group that works really well together,” he said.

“Do I want to be a senior coach? Yes. I’m confident enough to think one day I can sit in the hot seat and have success, but I’m not in any rush, and I don’t think I need to go and coach my own team before I feel like I’m ready.

“I love learning, I love what I’m doing, and I’ve still got plenty to learn. And we have plenty that we still want to achieve as a group.”