Adem Yze: Can Every Young Tiger Have an Individual Development Plan without Richmond Becoming an Individually Coached Team?
Updated: Oct 9
Every young Richmond footballer should have an individual development plan. The trouble begins when every plan is working and the team still is not. One midfielder might be rewarded for finding more of the ball, a winger for getting forward more often and a defender for taking extra intercept marks. Those are useful individual ambitions. But what if the midfielder abandons the defensive exit, the winger leaves an opponent free and the defender attacks a mark that nobody remains behind to cover? Adem Yze has to develop very different young players without creating eighteen private versions of successful football.
A development plan should identify the skill or decision a youngster most needs to improve. It should not become a target detached from the team's next action. Richmond may require a forward to improve pressure, for example, but rewarding additional tackles without asking which exit he closed could teach exactly the wrong habit. In the full RTSSG Members investigation, we examine what an individual development plan is actually for and when personal progress can become team damage. We ask whether the club can prove that a player's newly learned strength is helping somebody else perform his role.
When can personal improvement actually damage Richmond's football?
The collision can be subtle. A young midfielder may need to attack the contest more confidently while the player beside him is being taught to keep the defensive side protected. If neither understands what the other is rehearsing, both can perform their individual instruction and produce a breakdown together. In the full feature, we dissect how one player's target must create an advantage for the next teammate and why the team plan should appear inside every personal review. We examine what the coaches should measure when individual progress statistics look positive but the shared football remains disconnected.
Different line coaches will naturally emphasise different skills. That is useful until the forward, midfield and defensive programs begin issuing instructions that cancel one another. A player cannot be asked to take more attacking risks by one coach and avoid the space those risks open by another unless Richmond has defined the handover. In our Members investigation, we examine how Yze can stop one coaching message cancelling another and how he should individualise a pathway without individualising the team standard. We test which principles must remain fixed even when each player is learning something entirely different.
Who settles a conflict between two players' development targets?
There is also the question of whose progress takes priority when two young Tigers require the same position or type of practice. A VFL midfielder may need more centre-bounce experience, but so may a teammate whose AFL pathway depends on the identical opportunity. Simply promising both individual plans is not enough to produce the necessary minutes. In the full feature, we look at who should own clashes between development targets and how the VFL can teach the same team through different lessons. We ask whether Richmond is prepared to make an uncomfortable allocation decision and explain it honestly to the footballers affected.
A plan also has to change when the evidence changes. A youngster who masters his first technical target may be ready for a harder responsibility, while another whose confidence has fallen might need a different route to the same team standard. Senior footballers should still trust that the younger players are not being exempted from collective rules. In the full Members investigation, we dissect when a personal program should be revised and what established Tigers need to see before they trust the rebuild's development process. The deeper issue is whether coaching flexibility produces connected teammates rather than endlessly moving targets.
How can an individual plan strengthen the next teammate?
Richmond cannot win future games by collecting the largest number of individual improvement stories. It has to show that each improvement makes the team's next decision more reliable, more dangerous or harder for an opponent to exploit. An excellent plan will sometimes ask a player to sacrifice a visible personal result so a teammate can do his job. In the complete Members investigation, we examine what would prove this system is working before the ladder changes and what Yze personally owns if it does not. The standard must remain one Richmond team, however many individual lessons it contains.
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