1997 Intermediate Boys Football

Equal 3rd in the State. 

This cohort (Class Of 1999) could have easily won 3 State Titles.

Seventeen of the Year 10s had two years prior gone within of 8 points of the 1995 Year 8 State Title. Fifteen of the team would 2 years later win the 1999 Herald Sun Country Shield, without even having to use Jon McCormick (avoiding injury in his draft year).

In 1997 it was wins against Wodonga High School (12 goals), Wangaratta Secondary College (198 points), Tallangatta, a team in Shepparton, and Fairhill High School. 

We lost to an extremely strong Galen team at the Showgrounds which had a kid called Tim “Wilbur” Williams jumping on everyone’s heads at Centre Half Forward, in what many of the boys talk about almost 30 years later as the most dominant schoolboy display they ever saw. Future 200-gamer for Carlton, Ryan Houlihan, was also in their line-up tearing us to shreds.

We then lost the State Semi Final at Scammell Reserve in Oakleigh in the rain.

The team featured two future Carlton teammates, the only time they teamed up at school – Year 10 Jon McCormick and Year 9 Sean O’Keefe. Both would be regulars in the U18 Murray Bushrangers in 1999, two years later. Incredibly they would be teammates with Houlihan at The Blues as well.

O’Keefe was already playing O&M Thirds for the Rovers as a Year 9 (unheard of in that era). He would the next year make the Vic Country Under 16s, and be picked in the AIS Australian Academy, seen as one of the Top 20 Footballers in Australia (as was Houlihan), who played against Ireland.

McCormick had the year before played in the U15 O&M Schoolboys, and Houlihan (a teammate in that team), later recounted “Hopper” as the “best Junior footballer I ever played with”. McCormick would win the U17 Junior League’s 1997 McCormick Medal (League B&F), his 2nd League Medal in 3 years (along with his 1996 Under 15 Ken Farrell Medal).