There’s a major changing of the guard at Echuca Football Club, with Simon Maddox stepping away from his role as a seniors co-coach. But he says he won’t be lost to the club — you might see him next taking money in the ticket box or cooking the post-game barbie.
Simon Maddox is having trouble talking.
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Too much shouting, too much talking, too little sleep, and it’s all caught up with him.
Yet the man who has been one of the architects of Echuca football’s rise and rise is not taking memories of flags won — and occasionally lost — into his retirement, despite just winning the 2026 premiership, his and his club’s fourth in five years (which does explain the sore throat).
Instead, the memories the man most call Smeagle will warm himself with in the years ahead are of community, of seeing young men make better decisions because they had a purpose and because they had someone, and a club, who cared about them for the long run.
And because coaching gave him the opportunity to be even the smallest part of that life journey.
Winning flags is fantastic; that’s the coach’s job.
But if you ask Smeagle his highlights, just for season 2026, his grand finale, he doesn’t hesitate.
The first was a foul, dark night in the depths of winter and the second was all about netball.
“We were on the track at Kildare, in June, where our training has been based all year because of the work at Vic Park, and it was freezing, the wind so strong the rain was going sideways and we had 42 boys on the track,” Smeagle said.
“There would be no warm showers after this run, there would be bugger all shelter and I will guarantee you at just about every other training session in northern Victoria that night you would have been lucky to find 15 or 20 players turn up.
“Not a single complaint, not a single gripe, just a hard, solid session — I knew that night we were going all the way.”
Now it is emotion, not exultation, making Smeagle struggle with a few words.
His second favourite has nothing to do with football.
This time Echuca’s netballers were playing finals — at an away venue, obviously — and at training he encouraged the players to try to get along to support the girls.
And virtually the entire seniors/reserves squad turned up.
If that gave the girls a boost, it doesn’t begin to describe what it did for the coach.
For Smeagle that’s what it is all about, it is those defining moments he believes are Echuca’s legacy for him as much as his legacy with the club.
“What I’m most proud of, I think, is the club’s culture. Echuca is not just about a seniors’ flag, it’s all the grades and teams, netball and football, it is our volunteers, our supporters, our juniors, everyone is valued and respected, everyone wants to be the best they can be,” he said.
“In the final analysis, footy is only a small part of your life, and I get more satisfaction out of seeing a ratbag 16-year-old who could go either way actually go somewhere, make a positive out of being a young feller from Echuca.
“A lot of us were there at some stage and if I had just a little hand in that, to encourage a youngster to have a purpose, to turn up for training a couple of times a week, be at every game day, keep fit, well if I did then it doesn’t get any better than that.
“The kids seem to absorb it, feed off each other and become achievers on and off the field.”
In the years ahead, around the bar when the Victoria Park redevelopment gets done, the old timers will talk about the good old days, the days when the green machine was winning flag after flag and they were part of it.
They’ll recall the screamers, the amazing goals and all that routine rubbish that gets so much better with the passing of every telling, every year. There will be those ‘I was there’ occasions and everyone will forget the training runs, the injuries, the losses — it will all be about the good old days.
For a guy whose legend will be woven through those stories, his decision to even think about the coaching job was no done deal.
“I didn’t really want the coaching job, truly,” Smeagle confessed.
“The club came to me and Walks (Andrew Walker) with a plan, and on paper it was a good plan, but I just wasn’t interested in making the commitment at that time.
“But they persisted, guys like Craig Sutton, Ash Byrne and Andrew Thomson kept coming back to me and talking about it.
“I knew we had spent a few years languishing in the bottom half of the competition and had had a few coaches come and go, so in the end I agreed.
“If it had been any other club the answer would have been no, but the combination of Walks — we had overlapped as players — and the persistence, and the fact it was Echuca, well we took it on.”
From here on it becomes an avalanche of attitude and achievement.
In 2020 the team made the preliminary final, an astonishing turnaround, and fuel to stoke the fires of a flag the next year.
Enter COVID and the side was 10-0 when the season was shut down. Initially Echuca was awarded a de facto flag, which was then (quite rightly, Smeagle says) withdrawn.
Echuca would then go on to win 2022, 2023 and 2024. Season 2025, however, was the year in which everything that could go wrong, did.
Smeagle recalled he had gone his whole career without hearing of a broken neck – and his team got two in the one year. Blown knees, hammies and other familiar blows were a dime a dozen — at one stage more than 20 players were on the injury list and under 18s were being dragooned into the seniors just to get a team on the field.
Then we reach 2026 and Smeagle’s quiet conviction from that midwinter epiphany would come true and Echuca would smash Shepparton, and the Maddox/Walker/Gus Byrnre show had delivered above and beyond expectations.
And it was time for him to go.
But not without acknowledging there’s much more to it than the headline act.
Coaching circa 2026, Smeagle says, is all consuming. Even a country club like his is getting closer to being run like a VFL/AFL side — the days of a bit of training and turn up Saturday afternoon, run a game and go home are long gone.
“With the technology available we can have data, video, analysis, stats, all of it ready first thing Monday, and we try and use it all to get better, but unlike the big leagues, we don’t have a swag of assistant coaches, it’s basically just the two of us,” Smeagle said.
“And we have been luckier than most, with Mark Lloyd as our football manager, and Kylie Coutts as our team manager, I don’t think we had to worry about a single administrative matter, they were fantastic and made our jobs so much easier.
“As did everyone at the club, we have such a fabulous network of volunteers, helpers, mentors and I know a lot of other coaches would be envious.”
Smeagle has also embraced the co-coaching structure. He reckons unless you are self-employed, or a teacher who is going to be finished by 4.30ish, it is almost impossible to make the commitment and deliver the results.
He also grins and suggests it’s also a great way to share the blame.
“When you’re co-coaching you’ve got someone to talk to, bounce ideas off, cover each other when necessary — it beats going into the Cal for a beer after a game and find 35 experts who’ll tell you what you should have done,” he laughed.
Asked the inevitable, if the Echuca juggernaut is good or bad for the twin towns, Smeagle ponders the question, looking for the trap to be sprung.
But there isn’t one, and he knows the answer is just as inevitable.
“Yes, and no,” he offers.
“Yes, we do tend to pull players in from surrounding areas, and no, I make no excuse for that. Just like us they want to be the best they can, and we don’t just get the guns, we get them at all levels because, as I said, they come for the club, the culture, as much as the game.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get there, but I see our organisation as being the closest thing to an AFL-level club outside Melbourne and we do it on a shoestring budget by comparison.
“We rarely bring in big-bucks outsiders, even the 15 or so players who live and train in Melbourne are locals who want to come home to play. Even the ex-AFL players we have had are homegrown — yes, we wanted to be the best we could be and we don’t apologise for that, we celebrate it.”
And then there’s the side of coaching very few ever see and no-one ever mentions.
When someone signs on, so do their families.
If you think players are giving up a lot of time, and the coach gives up a lot more, try totting up the hours for the someone who picks up the slack at home.
Smeagle’s wife, Melissa, is patiently long suffering, their children Taj and Kai are already moving through the junior ranks at Echuca and some weeks the most dialogue they might fit in is when one of them comes out around 11pm and asks him to turn down the clips he is reviewing so they can go to sleep.
Yes, it’s time to go.
Footnote: If you were wondering where the nickname came from, look up Smeagol in Lord of the Rings and thank a coach who, looking at a scrawny Maddox the better part of 25 years ago said he looked just like the character — and it stuck.