POS ITIVE THINKING
game happened to be my last. With some sadness I retired from my playing position at the club. But it certainly wasn’t the end of my time at the club — in many ways it was the beginning of a new adventure. Almost straight away the guys running
Allen Aylett is a legend. On 16 June 1979 he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of services to Australian rules football. On 24 October 2000 he was awarded the Australian Sports Medal for his contribution to Australian football. On 1 January 2001 he was awarded the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society through the sport of AFL football. He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2006.
Allen was a passionate and qualified dentist, only recently retiring at the age of 81. He played 220 games and kicked 311 goals for the North Melbourne Football Club in a career spanning from 1952 to 1964. He won the Best and Fairest award from 1958 to 1960, was All-Australian in 1958 and 1961, won the Tassie Medal in 1958, the Simpson Medal in 1960, and was captain of his side from 1961 to 1964. He was selected in North Melbourne Football Club’s Team of the Century.
After his playing career Allen led the North Melbourne Football Club, as president, to their first premiership in 1975. He then went on to the presidency of the Victorian Football League (VFL), leading the organisation from a state to a national competition, Australian Football League, in 1982.
26 APRIL 2017
the club asked me to be on the board. In the beginning of 1965 I took up the position on the North Melbourne Football Club Board for the next five years — five long years! The football club, during this period, was not having any success on the field. In fact, the talk around the town was, “Poor old North. What’s going to happen to them? They will be out of the competition.”It really upset me that people were saying we were finished and out of the competition. We were so passionate about playing for North Melbourne, what the club meant to us, and what North Melbourne meant to a lot of other people. I wanted to make a difference and help get the winning feeling back at the club, but nothing was actually happening at board level in order to change our lack of success through the 1960s. I retired from the board even though
my mates tried to persuade me to stay on. In my mind, as sad as it was, I felt it was time for me to move on. I finished up and it was only about three or four weeks before the board sent a delegation to my home. I was ill at that time, which was a very rare occurrence, but the delegation came to my bedside and said, “We’ve got an offer to put to you.”They didn’t waste any time: “You can either be the coach of the North Melbourne Football Club or the president”.“Well, I’d just like to think about it a bit. It’s all come out of the blue and here I am lying unwell in front of you guys and you’re putting this massive decision to me”, I said. “Well, you know, we want to try
and get it cleared up and we’re really desperate for you to do something — one of those two things”, they responded. I told them to let me think about it. I only really got to think about it for
two or three days before they came back and so I said, “Well, I’m happy to come
back, but if I do come back I want to be the president”. When I was appointed President in
1971, I made a commitment to bring positive change to the club. There was so much potential, yet so few results — something had to change. I adopted personal success author Napoleon Hill as our mastermind. Through his teachings I learned the importance of working with teams, leadership skills, and many of the other principles of running a successful organisation such as goal setting and having a business plan.
THE PLAN Our committee at North Melbourne began to have regular early morning meetings, which were much more productive than evening meetings. We set goals and kept accurate reports on how we were tracking. We measured our development and put together a five- year plan to win a premiership, our first ever, in just five years: 1975. It was a bold plan and an ambitious
goal that was going to take an enormous effort. The club had not won a premiership in its entire history in the VFL. So I started to make some radical, even unpopular, decisions. I knew that we had to try something different. The first thing we did was to look
around, learn from others, and convince good people to join our group and enjoy the ride. We appointed Brian Dixon as coach and he introduced a handball style to the club. It was seen by many people to be excessive use of handball. He was so resolute about introducing it, however it had never been seen before, and consequently we made lots of mistakes. Brian copped more abuse from our supporters than the footballers did! But the football world was changing and shifting more and more towards this handball-based game – as it is today. The first two years into our five-year
plan were not looking positive on the scoreboard, but we had faith. We knew that if we stuck to the plan, persisted, learned from mistakes, kept building, and kept growing we would make it happen. The end result was that we did win the premiership in 1975. I don’t think you can say definitively as a rule
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