1999 Intermediate Boys Football

Our 3rd team to win the Inter Boys State Title in 6 years (1994, 1998 the others). Our only team ever to go back-to-back.

They won 8 matches undefeated, and won the State Final by 37 points against Kyabram Secondary College at Dookie. But they did have a scare in their first stage (NEDSSSA, now know as Upper Hume) getting over Wodonga High School by just 1 point at the Barr Reserve, with Captain Joe Doody out injured, and gun Full Back Lachie Smith and gun midfielder Brendan Gamze both missing due to (inexplicably) Work Experience. All 3 of those missing players were named in the Best 4 players later in the State Final.

For 5 of the Year 10s (Captain Joe Doody, Vice Captain Steve Johnson, Brendan Gamze, Karl Norman, Heath Stamp and Frances Sippin) it was Back-To-Back after their 1998 win as Year 9s. 

For 4 of those (Doody, Johnson, Norman, Gamze and Stamp) it was a record 3 State Titles in their 4 years (1996 Year 7, and 1998 Intermediate). They are the only 4 of our boys to ever play in 3. In fact, there are only 2 other schools in Victoria that ever achieved the same – Sunbury and Bendigo Catholic College.

For Coach John Evans, it was not only back-to-back, but his 3rd in 6 years (1994 Intermediates his 1st).

This team had the most Top Shelf talent of any of our teams in history, other than the 1998 side the year prior. Three future AFL players (Year 10s Steve Johnson and Karl Norman, and Year 9 Luke Mullins).

Johnson of course would become an AFL legend – 293 games, 3-time Premierships with Geelong, 3-time All Australian, 2-time Geelong Leading Goalkicker, 1x Norm Smith Medal (and could easily have been awarded a 2nd Norm Smith with his 4 match-winning goals in the 2011 win against Collingwood), and a 3rd place in the Brownlow Medal. Many would pick him as their Forward Flanker the AFL Team Of the Last 25 Years (2000-2025).

Johnson was one of the few Year 10s in town playing O&M Thirds at the time. The year prior he’d single-handedly won Tigers the 1998 U17 Junior League Grand Final as a skinny Year 9 playing against Year 12s, kicking 5 goals, 3 of them brilliant (2 snaps on his opposite side), but was somehow overlooked for the U15 O&M Schoolboys that year, and again for the U16 Murray Bushrangers in 1999. The next year at Year 11 he was the star of the Wangaratta Magpies Thirds team, leading them to the Grand Final and finishing 2nd on the League Goalkicking. In 2001 as a Year 12 though when they finally picked him, he was U18 All Australian within months of playing his 1st Bushrangers game. He also filled in for a game for the Magpies Seniors, and up to the point he broke his arm halfway through the 3rd quarter, he’d had..43 possessions. He managed only 10 Bushrangers games, but was still their Leading Goalkicker.

Norman played 27 AFL games for Carlton, but most say he had the talent to play 200. Post-Carlton, Leigh Matthews called him about playing for the Brisbane Lions, but he didn’t call back. Western Bulldogs tried to recruit him post-Carlton, but he declined in preference to returning home to the country. His father Steve was famous as one of the greatest and most freakishly talented Ovens & Murray players of all time, winning 7 Senior Premierships with the Wangaratta Rovers and kicking over 1000 goals.

By this point (1999) Norman had already played Ovens & King Seniors (at 15 years old). He would the next year start Pre-Season trials with the Murray Bushrangers, but stopped going, and instead won the 2000 Rovers Thirds Best & Fairest and played some Senior games as a Year 11. In his Year 12 year, he won the 2000 Seniors Best & Fairest for Glenrowan – surely one of the youngest O&K Senior Best & Fairest winners in history. At 19 he dominated at Centre Half Back for the Rovers Seniors, took 15 marks in a game, was Runner-Up in the B&F, and was drafted to Carlton months at the end of 2002. He was one of the extreme few of that era to be drafted without having played either TAC Cup (now known as the Coates Talent League) or VFL.