From a rookie punt to head coach: Dean Cox’s rise comes as no surprise to West Coast Eagles mentors

New Sydney Swans coach Dean Cox has made two huge moves in his life. The first was to shift from Dampier to Perth to chase an AFL career and the second was to shift from West Coast to Sydney to develop his coaching. Both moves proved to be master strokes. Cox wasn’t among the 87 players chosen in the 1999 AFL draft. Another 15 players were then picked in the pre-season draft and he still didn’t get his name called out. It took until selection 28 in the rookie draft for West Coast to take a punt on the 203cm gangly country kid. But boy did that pay off as he played 290 games, won a premiership and became a six-time All-Australian. Now he’s been appointed to follow in the footsteps of John Longmire, Paul Roos, Rodney Eade and Ron Barassi as Sydney Swans coaches over the last 30 years. Former West Coast coach John Worsfold said it was clear from the moment Cox left the comfort of his job at the Eagles at the end of 2017 to join Sydney that he was determined to reach the top. “It states the commitment that you’ve got to your coaching career,” Worsfold told The West Australian. “He made a big move and packed everyone up to move interstate so he could get to a different club, different environment and absorb that. “He might have said that he’d learnt a lot, and West Coast is a great club and is professional, but when you go to another great club and see they are professional and do things differently, you learn a lot from that. “You also learn what suits your personality style and what you’d like to take into the way you would coach. I think that was massive. It says a lot about how serious you are about your coaching career.” Cox will take on the challenge of taking over a Sydney team that is reeling from two grand final thumpings in the last three seasons. They lost to Geelong by 81 points in 2022 and followed that with a 60-point defeat from Brisbane this year. But Cox has always embraced a challenge. When he arrived at West Coast from Dampier, even his coach Ken Judge was doubting if he was good enough to play at the highest level, let alone become a Hall of Famer. Former East Perth Head Coach and West Coast assistant coach Tony Micale recalled Cox being a long way behind the rest of the team. “We were doing our pre-season at City Beach and the players were doing four lots of 400s and I remember Coxy collapsing past the finishing post. He couldn’t do it,” Micale said. “And the remarkable thing was we saw what sort of a running machine he turned into in the AFL. “Judgey and I argued about playing him at East Perth because I thought it was premature. I thought he wasn’t ready for senior footy. “Dean stuck it up me well and truly because he went out later that year and won a Simpson Medal in a grand final.” Cox rejected the chance to apply for the West Coast job to remain in Sydney and now his dream has come true. Sydney’s coaches have been so successful that club president Andrew Pridham joked that he looked forward to seeing Cox being in charge for 14 years when announcing his four-year contract. “It’s a massive thing for myself and our family,” Cox said. “My playing career ended and when it finished I was all about how can I try to help players to experience what I experienced.”