Jake Miller and the Long Road to Being Tasmania’s First
Every new club needs a first name on the list, and for the Tasmania Football Club that name belongs to Jake Miller, a freakishly quick runner whose path to this point has been shaped as much by loss as by talent. It is a story worth sitting with, because the symbolism of being the inaugural Tasmanian Devil will follow Miller for the rest of his career, whether he likes it or not.
The weight of being number one
There is always a particular pressure that comes with being the first of anything in football, and expansion history tells us it rarely sits lightly. GWS had Callan Ward wearing the early captaincy burden, Gold Coast had Gary Ablett shouldering unreasonable expectation, and now Tasmania has Jake Miller as the answer to a trivia question that will be asked for decades. I say this not to pile pressure onto a young man who has not played a senior game, but to make the point that the club’s administrators, and the AFL Commission that ultimately signed off on this licence, owe him more than a photo opportunity at the draft. They owe him a genuine development pathway, and from what I have seen of the planning around Tasmania’s entry, that appears to be exactly what is being built.
It is easy, in the rush of a new club’s unveiling, to reduce a player to a marketing asset. Miller deserves better than that, and so does the Tasmanian public who have waited the best part of two decades for this moment.
A mentor lost too soon
The background to Miller’s rise includes the late Dale Tapping, a figure spoken of with real affection in Tasmanian football circles for the work he put into developing talent on an island that has too often watched its best footballers shipped to the mainland before they were ready. Tapping’s passing is the kind of loss that reshapes a young player’s trajectory in ways that are hard to quantify from the outside, and it would be glib of me to pretend I can speak to the private grief involved. What can be said, respectfully, is that Miller has credited that early guidance as foundational, and there is something fitting about a Tasmanian pathway figure’s influence being carried into the state’s first AFL list.
This is also a reminder, as the Tasmania project rolls forward, that the AFL’s talk of legacy and pathways means very little unless it is backed by proper investment in grassroots coaching and development staff on the ground. The licence agreement includes commitments in this area, and the Commission would do well to keep reporting publicly on how that money is actually being spent, rather than leaving it as a line item in a glossy business case.
The Riewoldt influence
St Kilda great Nick Riewoldt’s involvement in Miller’s development is the sort of detail that will delight those who like a neat narrative thread, given Riewoldt’s own connection to the game’s traditions and his standing as one of the most articulate voices on player welfare in the post-career commentariat. Whatever role Riewoldt has played, whether formal mentoring or informal conversation, it speaks to a broader and welcome trend of respected former players investing time in emerging talent rather than simply occupying commentary boxes. Adelaide fans will have their own memories of Riewoldt tormenting the Crows across a long career, but there is no denying his standing in the game now extends well beyond what he did in a St Kilda jumper.
A Carlton youngster in the mix
Reports suggest a Carlton youngster has also been part of Miller’s football education, underlining how porous and informal these development relationships often are at the elite underage level, long before official club affiliations are settled. It is a useful corrective to the tribalism that dominates so much football discussion, this one included, to remember that at seventeen and eighteen the best young players are training alongside, competing against and learning from kids who will end up at rival clubs entirely. The competitive system only works because that cross-pollination happens before the guernseys are handed out.
The freakish running and the question marks
On raw athletic testing, Miller is described as a freakish runner, the kind of result that gets recruiters reaching for comparisons to players whose endurance base became a point of difference at AFL level. I would urge some caution here, not because the testing numbers are not real, but because draft history is littered with athletic freaks who never translated that running capacity into consistent output under genuine match pressure. The appetite for hard work attributed to Miller is, in my view, the more reliable indicator of what is to come. Running times fade in relevance the moment a contest starts; work ethic tends to be the trait that survives first-year disappointment, reserves football and the inevitable homesickness of leaving Tasmania, even for a club that is nominally his own state’s team.
There is also a structural question the AFL has not fully answered: how will Tasmania, as a genuinely new entity without an existing list base or established football department culture, manage the development of players like Miller in year one, when results are likely to be scarce and patience will be tested? The Commission has been reasonably transparent about the staged build of the club’s list and infrastructure, but transparency about timelines is not the same as certainty about outcomes, and Tasmanian supporters deserve honesty on both fronts as the seasons unfold.
What Adelaide fans, and the rest of the competition, should watch for
As a Crows supporter, I have no particular stake in Tasmania’s fortunes beyond the healthy interest any addition to the competition generates, but there is a broader governance point worth making. The success or failure of players like Miller will become a proxy measure for whether this expansion was handled properly, and whether the AFL’s stated commitment to grassroots Tasmanian football was more than rhetoric deployed to secure stadium funding from state and federal governments. If Miller thrives, it will be cited as vindication. If he struggles, critics of the licence will use it as ammunition regardless of whether his development was ever given a fair chance.
That is an unfair burden to place on any twenty-year-old, but it is the reality of being first. The best thing the football department, the Commission and the broader industry can do is resist turning Jake Miller into a symbol before he has had the chance to simply become a footballer. The people behind him, Tapping’s legacy, Riewoldt’s counsel, whatever he has drawn from his Carlton-listed training partners, suggest he has had decent support to this point. Whether that support continues with the same seriousness once the cameras move on to the next story will say a great deal about how genuinely this competition values the project it has just launched.
