Coaching Career
Todd first coached his old club South Fremantle as a captain-coach in 1959, then after his retirement as a player, from 1966-1968. He then coached East Fremantle from 1973–1976, including winning the 1974 premiership. In 1977 he moved to Swan Districts, where he coached for eleven seasons winning a hat-trick of premierships between 1982 and 1984.
While at Swans in 1982, Todd caused controversy by sending a team of reserves and colts to Melbourne to compete in the Escort Cup quarter-final against VFL club Richmond. Todd's actions were in protest to a change of the quarter final schedule, which he felt would be detrimental to his senior team's performance in the WAFL. The inexperienced team lost by 186 points, and Swan Districts was banned from the Escort Cup for two years.
In October 1987, Todd was due to fly to Adelaide to sign with SANFL club Woodville. But the management of the fledgling West Coast managed to get hold of him first and secure his signature as coach for the 1988 VFL season after they had just unceremoniously dumped Ron Alexander. This despite the fact that he had led the Eagles to a respectable eighth-place finish in their first season, and that Alexander was on a three-year contract.
One of Todd's first moves as coach of West Coast was to field almost two different teams: one to play at home in Perth and one to play interstate. While there would be a nucleus of key players for all the matches, Todd declared that he would pick his teams for interstate matches based on who could cope best with the different conditions. The idea seemed reasonable, based on the previous season's results; in their first year of VFL football, of the 11 games the Eagles had won, only two of them were away from home. Todd also perceived that the players had treated the interstate trips as holidays, and so he organized travel arrangements to be as short as possible, with players departing Perth late on Friday and then returning home after the game.
He was the first coach to take West Coast into the finals in 1988, losing the Elimination Final to Melbourne by two points. After a mediocre year in 1989 he was succeeded by Mick Malthouse.
Todd returned to Swan Districts, taking the team to a premiership in his first year back in 1990, before moving back to his original team, South Fremantle in 1995. He coached them to the 1997 premiership before leaving again after the 1998 season, taking a year off from coaching. In 2000 he made his final move, back to Swan Districts, before finally retiring at the end of 2002. In August 2001 he became the first West Australian and the fourth Australian to coach 700 senior games. The Parliament of Western Australia suspended its standing orders to pass a motion of congratulation to Todd for his contribution to Australian rules football.
In addition to his 721 league games as coach, Todd also coached Western Australia for 14 games, to take his total to 735 games. He also coached six International Rules tests for Australia.
In all, Todd coached in seven Grand Finals, winning six of them. He felt though that the one defeat was with the best team he had coached - the 1980 Swan Districts team, which won their first 13 games during the home-and-away season but lost to South Fremantle in the Grand Final.
Todd was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2003 as a coach and is a legend of the West Australian Football Hall of Fame.
Read more about this topic: John Todd (footballer)
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