20 YEARS AGO, Cobh man Shane Lehane was in Australia for a few weeks’ holiday before he started college back home.
Lehane, who had just turned 19, was all set to go to University College Cork to study history and play rugby.
He and his friend were in Sydney and decided to go along to the famous Sydney Cricket Ground to watch an Aussie rules game between the Sydney Swans and Adelaide Crows. They hadn’t even really seen the sport ever before.
“I wouldn’t have had a clue about AFL at the time,” says Lehane.
“If someone had told me then, ’20 years from now, you’ll be head of performance at the Sydney Swans,’ I would have gone, ‘I’m on my way to study history, what is the possible path that could result in that?’”
Life can take unexpected routes.
Lehane joined the Swans in 2021 as part of their athletic performance staff and was promoted to his current role as Head of Athletic Performance in October 2024. The Swans are currently flying high, sitting second on this season’s AFL ladder.
As it happens, today is the start of Lehane’s 17th year in professional sport, having previously worked in rugby union with Leicester, the Melbourne Rebels, and the Wallabies.
Lehane is in a very exciting place.
Shane Lehane is the Sydney Swans' head of athletic performance. Sydney Swans.
Sydney Swans.
The 42 was invited to take a tour of the Swans’ stunning training centre.
It is a world-class facility set in the iconic old Royal Hall of Industries building in Sydney’s Moore Park, which is also home to the Swans’ home venue, Sydney Cricket Ground [SCG], and Allianz Stadium, where Ireland play Australia in the Nations Championship on Saturday.
The state-of-the-art $70 million (€61.44 million) training centre opened in 2023 and is among the best facilities in Australia, where there are many elite sporting institutions.
The building houses both the Swans’ men’s and women’s AFL teams. It revolves around a 60m x 30m indoor pitch, with the facilities including a huge gym, an altitude training studio filled with Wattbikes, a swimming pool with hot and cold plunges, and saunas.
Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
There are meeting rooms galore, a large auditorium, a café where the players are fed top-class food, sleeping pods for naps, a full-size basketball court, the players’ lounge, including a golf simulator, office spaces, as well as an outdoor area for barbecues and events.
With the SCG literally around the corner, the Swans warm up for games in their HQ, while post-match functions also take place there.
The reception area has a sparkling museum detailing the Swans’ history and a club shop, with the whole building flowing together smoothly. It feels like everyone and everything is connected, with the indoor pitch visible from nearly every vantage point.
And all of this in a stunning historic building that is listed, and certainly doesn’t look like it would house a training centre from the outside.
Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
So it’s fair to say that Lehane has come a long way since 2010 when he was doing an internship with Richard Cockerill’s Leicester.
The Irishman made a big impression there, but there was very little room in the Tigers’ budget to pay him for a longer-term role, so Lehane had to flog some old gym gear from the club and come up with a few other inventive ways to make money.
“I remember we were sponsored by Cotton Traders,” says Lehane with a laugh as he sits in a meeting room after the tour of the Swans’ home.
Advertisement
“They would send loads of kit and at the end of the year, I would go into the kit man’s room, and I would take all the old shorts and then print number 10 on them, so people thought they were Toby Flood’s or something.
“And then I’d put them on eBay and sell them to get some more cash.”
Lehane hadn’t gone down the history route, of course. He switched to a sports science degree at Loughborough University in the UK, did internships with Ulster, Munster and Ireland, then eventually landed a full-time role in Leicester after his initial travails.
Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
He moved to Melbourne to join the Rebels in 2015, driving his own athletic performance programme there, then had an enjoyable spell with the Wallabies during the pandemic, before switching away from the sport that was his first true love.
Lehane had come to admire Aussie rules while working in Australian rugby, and he has enjoyed dealing with the differences ever since switching to the Swans.
“It’s a real running-based game,” says Lehane of the AFL.
“The guys will run anywhere from 12 to 16-plus kilometres in a game over a three-hour period. It’s a big high-volume running-based game.
“Then, the contact element is massive. It’s not man-on-man with a 10-metre line-up to whack each other, but it’s 360-degrees, constant all the time, being able to get into low body positions and compete for the ball or to make tackles is really important.
“There might be 10 big out-and-out tackles in a game. The contact comes from all angles, not just front-on. And that 10 doesn’t account for the other contact, like getting punched in the back of the head and pushed off the ball. The incidental contact is through the roof.”
“Being good aerially is obviously really important for a lot of the players, just as it will be for a back-three player in rugby union.
“So there are definitely lots of differences, but more similarities than I expected.”
He explains in layman’s terms that the players who form the spine of the team down the middle of the field are like forwards in rugby union. They’re bigger, taller, heavier athletes who do more contact-based work.
Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
Then the faster, running-based players are on the outer reaches of the field, like the backs in rugby union.
Lehane worked with some elite athletes in rugby union before, but he says the AFL players are extraordinary specimens.
“The sporting diversity in Australia is crazy,” says Lehane. “It’s obviously a larger country than Ireland, but it’s still only a population of around 25 million people, and they’re competitive at so many sports.
“Rugby union’s probably the fifth-biggest sport in Australia, and you’re not only competing with all the field-based sports – rugby league, AFL, cricket, soccer’s massive, basketball’s massive – but you have all the beach-based activities, surfing and Ironman events, so it’s highly competitive.
“It does start to funnel a little bit at the top towards AFL and NRL [rugby league] in particular though. That’s where probably the best athletes are orientated.
“We’ve got a lot of talent and a lot of guys actually even who’ve had rugby backgrounds. They would have played dual sports growing up and been around academy systems underage, but start funnelling more towards AFL as they get a little bit older.”
AFL is big business in Australia, as illustrated by the splendid Swans’ facility.
The club has around 400 staff across all departments.
“AFL is really well funded,” says Lehane, who also finds the time to study for a PhD related to decision-making in athletic performance coaching.
“I think it’s a good balance in that it’s a really well-funded program and the facilities are excellent, and we’re really well resourced as a sports staff and as a football department, and the players are really well compensated, but not to the point where they’re disinterested.
“We still have a lot of influence on the programme; it’s not at the point where it’s like Premier League football or NBA where there’s a lot of external influences.
“So for me, it’s a really enjoyable space to work in. I think our facilities are as good as any Premier League team would have, they’re as good as a lot of the American-based facilities, so we’re really well resourced.”
Organisations from lots of other sports come to the Swans to study how they work, with a contingent from the Ireland set-up visiting this week, and coaches from Scotland and the Springboks having recently dropped in.
Lehane [right] with the Swans players before a game. Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
Because they’ve been winning so much recently, the Swans – who most recently made the AFL Grand Final in 2022 and 2024 – have been attracting strong crowds of close to the capacity of around 44,000 at the SCG.
The SCG one of the smaller AFL grounds, but it’s dripping in history. And the Swans hope to be back in the Grand Final this year, with a crowd of over 100,000 attending the Melbourne Cricket Ground for that game every season.
The AFL is a “draft-based egalitarian system” which means that continued success is a challenge, but the Swans – known locally as the ‘Bloods’ due to their red and white kit – have repeatedly made the finals series for well over two decades.
10 of the current 18 AFL clubs are based in the Aussie rules stronghold of Victoria, with a 19th club based in Tasmania to join in 2028. Like rugby league’s NRL, the AFL is still expanding.
The season runs from March until September every year, although AFL has a 365-days-a-year news cycle. The players get a healthy off-season of eight, 10, or 12 weeks depending on the club’s previous campaign, with pre-season beginning in November.
Yet, Lehane explains that there is no one rocking up for AFL pre-season well-summered.
“One of the first things that gets a lot of media attention is the two-kilometre time trial, which is the return fitness test.
“Pretty much every club will publish, not the times, but they’ll publish publicly who’s finished in what order, and that is big media news.
“There’s no one coming back out of shape as an AFL player. It’s not even just unacceptable, it simply does not happen. You just can’t. It’s too hard. The physical expectations are really high.”
To get the athletes ready, Lehane has to manage a big team of athletic performance coaches, who are well connected to all other departments such as the football coaches and the medical staff.
Sydney Swans
Sydney Swans
He has some fellow Irish folk on the staff, including ex-Tipperary footballer Colin O’Riordan, who played AFL for the Swans and is now head coach of the women’s team, who have four Irish players – Tanya Kennedy, Paris McCarthy, Julie O’Sullivan, and Mary-Kate Lynch. There’s another bit of Tipp influence in dietitian Rachel Malone.
Lehane jokes that he has “properly drunk the Swans Kool-Aid” before explaining that the organisation is well known for being stable and competitive, but empathetic towards its staff. Their families are a big part of it all.
His two young daughters love coming into the training centre and Lehane’s wife, fellow Cobh native Sarah, is as happy as he is in Sydney.
He is closing in on 19 years away from Ireland between being in the UK and Australia, but Lehane is still loving it all.
“My mother keeps sending me every random job that comes up at home,” says Lehane with a smile.
“You know, PE teacher at the local school, and she’s like, ‘You could do this.’
“I’d never say never, and obviously I’m still a massive fan of the Irish sporting teams, the Irish rugby team, so it’s not an impossibility, but definitely life is over here at the minute.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
6 Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
Inside the Sydney Swans' stunning HQ with Cobh man Shane Lehane
20 YEARS AGO, Cobh man Shane Lehane was in Australia for a few weeks’ holiday before he started college back home.
Lehane, who had just turned 19, was all set to go to University College Cork to study history and play rugby.
He and his friend were in Sydney and decided to go along to the famous Sydney Cricket Ground to watch an Aussie rules game between the Sydney Swans and Adelaide Crows. They hadn’t even really seen the sport ever before.
“I wouldn’t have had a clue about AFL at the time,” says Lehane.
“If someone had told me then, ’20 years from now, you’ll be head of performance at the Sydney Swans,’ I would have gone, ‘I’m on my way to study history, what is the possible path that could result in that?’”
Life can take unexpected routes.
Lehane joined the Swans in 2021 as part of their athletic performance staff and was promoted to his current role as Head of Athletic Performance in October 2024. The Swans are currently flying high, sitting second on this season’s AFL ladder.
As it happens, today is the start of Lehane’s 17th year in professional sport, having previously worked in rugby union with Leicester, the Melbourne Rebels, and the Wallabies.
Lehane is in a very exciting place.
The 42 was invited to take a tour of the Swans’ stunning training centre.
It is a world-class facility set in the iconic old Royal Hall of Industries building in Sydney’s Moore Park, which is also home to the Swans’ home venue, Sydney Cricket Ground [SCG], and Allianz Stadium, where Ireland play Australia in the Nations Championship on Saturday.
The state-of-the-art $70 million (€61.44 million) training centre opened in 2023 and is among the best facilities in Australia, where there are many elite sporting institutions.
The building houses both the Swans’ men’s and women’s AFL teams. It revolves around a 60m x 30m indoor pitch, with the facilities including a huge gym, an altitude training studio filled with Wattbikes, a swimming pool with hot and cold plunges, and saunas.
There are meeting rooms galore, a large auditorium, a café where the players are fed top-class food, sleeping pods for naps, a full-size basketball court, the players’ lounge, including a golf simulator, office spaces, as well as an outdoor area for barbecues and events.
With the SCG literally around the corner, the Swans warm up for games in their HQ, while post-match functions also take place there.
The reception area has a sparkling museum detailing the Swans’ history and a club shop, with the whole building flowing together smoothly. It feels like everyone and everything is connected, with the indoor pitch visible from nearly every vantage point.
And all of this in a stunning historic building that is listed, and certainly doesn’t look like it would house a training centre from the outside.
So it’s fair to say that Lehane has come a long way since 2010 when he was doing an internship with Richard Cockerill’s Leicester.
The Irishman made a big impression there, but there was very little room in the Tigers’ budget to pay him for a longer-term role, so Lehane had to flog some old gym gear from the club and come up with a few other inventive ways to make money.
“I remember we were sponsored by Cotton Traders,” says Lehane with a laugh as he sits in a meeting room after the tour of the Swans’ home.
“They would send loads of kit and at the end of the year, I would go into the kit man’s room, and I would take all the old shorts and then print number 10 on them, so people thought they were Toby Flood’s or something.
“And then I’d put them on eBay and sell them to get some more cash.”
Lehane hadn’t gone down the history route, of course. He switched to a sports science degree at Loughborough University in the UK, did internships with Ulster, Munster and Ireland, then eventually landed a full-time role in Leicester after his initial travails.
He moved to Melbourne to join the Rebels in 2015, driving his own athletic performance programme there, then had an enjoyable spell with the Wallabies during the pandemic, before switching away from the sport that was his first true love.
Lehane had come to admire Aussie rules while working in Australian rugby, and he has enjoyed dealing with the differences ever since switching to the Swans.
“It’s a real running-based game,” says Lehane of the AFL.
“The guys will run anywhere from 12 to 16-plus kilometres in a game over a three-hour period. It’s a big high-volume running-based game.
“Then, the contact element is massive. It’s not man-on-man with a 10-metre line-up to whack each other, but it’s 360-degrees, constant all the time, being able to get into low body positions and compete for the ball or to make tackles is really important.
“There might be 10 big out-and-out tackles in a game. The contact comes from all angles, not just front-on. And that 10 doesn’t account for the other contact, like getting punched in the back of the head and pushed off the ball. The incidental contact is through the roof.”
“Being good aerially is obviously really important for a lot of the players, just as it will be for a back-three player in rugby union.
“So there are definitely lots of differences, but more similarities than I expected.”
He explains in layman’s terms that the players who form the spine of the team down the middle of the field are like forwards in rugby union. They’re bigger, taller, heavier athletes who do more contact-based work.
Then the faster, running-based players are on the outer reaches of the field, like the backs in rugby union.
Lehane worked with some elite athletes in rugby union before, but he says the AFL players are extraordinary specimens.
“The sporting diversity in Australia is crazy,” says Lehane. “It’s obviously a larger country than Ireland, but it’s still only a population of around 25 million people, and they’re competitive at so many sports.
“Rugby union’s probably the fifth-biggest sport in Australia, and you’re not only competing with all the field-based sports – rugby league, AFL, cricket, soccer’s massive, basketball’s massive – but you have all the beach-based activities, surfing and Ironman events, so it’s highly competitive.
“It does start to funnel a little bit at the top towards AFL and NRL [rugby league] in particular though. That’s where probably the best athletes are orientated.
“We’ve got a lot of talent and a lot of guys actually even who’ve had rugby backgrounds. They would have played dual sports growing up and been around academy systems underage, but start funnelling more towards AFL as they get a little bit older.”
AFL is big business in Australia, as illustrated by the splendid Swans’ facility.
The club has around 400 staff across all departments.
“AFL is really well funded,” says Lehane, who also finds the time to study for a PhD related to decision-making in athletic performance coaching.
“I think it’s a good balance in that it’s a really well-funded program and the facilities are excellent, and we’re really well resourced as a sports staff and as a football department, and the players are really well compensated, but not to the point where they’re disinterested.
“We still have a lot of influence on the programme; it’s not at the point where it’s like Premier League football or NBA where there’s a lot of external influences.
“So for me, it’s a really enjoyable space to work in. I think our facilities are as good as any Premier League team would have, they’re as good as a lot of the American-based facilities, so we’re really well resourced.”
Organisations from lots of other sports come to the Swans to study how they work, with a contingent from the Ireland set-up visiting this week, and coaches from Scotland and the Springboks having recently dropped in.
Because they’ve been winning so much recently, the Swans – who most recently made the AFL Grand Final in 2022 and 2024 – have been attracting strong crowds of close to the capacity of around 44,000 at the SCG.
The SCG one of the smaller AFL grounds, but it’s dripping in history. And the Swans hope to be back in the Grand Final this year, with a crowd of over 100,000 attending the Melbourne Cricket Ground for that game every season.
The AFL is a “draft-based egalitarian system” which means that continued success is a challenge, but the Swans – known locally as the ‘Bloods’ due to their red and white kit – have repeatedly made the finals series for well over two decades.
10 of the current 18 AFL clubs are based in the Aussie rules stronghold of Victoria, with a 19th club based in Tasmania to join in 2028. Like rugby league’s NRL, the AFL is still expanding.
The season runs from March until September every year, although AFL has a 365-days-a-year news cycle. The players get a healthy off-season of eight, 10, or 12 weeks depending on the club’s previous campaign, with pre-season beginning in November.
Yet, Lehane explains that there is no one rocking up for AFL pre-season well-summered.
“One of the first things that gets a lot of media attention is the two-kilometre time trial, which is the return fitness test.
“Pretty much every club will publish, not the times, but they’ll publish publicly who’s finished in what order, and that is big media news.
“There’s no one coming back out of shape as an AFL player. It’s not even just unacceptable, it simply does not happen. You just can’t. It’s too hard. The physical expectations are really high.”
To get the athletes ready, Lehane has to manage a big team of athletic performance coaches, who are well connected to all other departments such as the football coaches and the medical staff.
He has some fellow Irish folk on the staff, including ex-Tipperary footballer Colin O’Riordan, who played AFL for the Swans and is now head coach of the women’s team, who have four Irish players – Tanya Kennedy, Paris McCarthy, Julie O’Sullivan, and Mary-Kate Lynch. There’s another bit of Tipp influence in dietitian Rachel Malone.
Lehane jokes that he has “properly drunk the Swans Kool-Aid” before explaining that the organisation is well known for being stable and competitive, but empathetic towards its staff. Their families are a big part of it all.
His two young daughters love coming into the training centre and Lehane’s wife, fellow Cobh native Sarah, is as happy as he is in Sydney.
He is closing in on 19 years away from Ireland between being in the UK and Australia, but Lehane is still loving it all.
“My mother keeps sending me every random job that comes up at home,” says Lehane with a smile.
“You know, PE teacher at the local school, and she’s like, ‘You could do this.’
“I’d never say never, and obviously I’m still a massive fan of the Irish sporting teams, the Irish rugby team, so it’s not an impossibility, but definitely life is over here at the minute.
“It’d be hard to turn your back on all of this.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Cobh Irish Abroad Shane Lehane Sydney Swans