Why Australian Football Team is Visiting Vanderbilt Football, Clark Lea
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NASHVILLE—18 hours of plane travel, stops in San Francisco, Cleveland and an eight-hour drive to Nashville later, Damien Hardwick and the rest of the Gold Coast Suns coaching staff were walking around the turf practice field at Vanderbilt’s McGugin Center with a purpose.
Hardwick wanted his coaching staff to observe everything that Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea did, how he spoke, how his players responded to him. They want to know what it took for him to build this and sustain this after years of irrelevance and turmoil. It was a similar mission to the one Lea set out on two offseasons ago as he studied New Mexico State offensive coordinator Tim Beck and its head coach Jerry Kill.
The fact-finding mission started when Hardwick and company–the coaching staff of an Australian rules football team–watched Netflix’s SEC Football Documentary Every Given Saturday and observed the way Lea went about his business through the climb of building an underdog program.
“One of the things that we sort of are trying to get an understanding of is how this program from once floundering has become so successful, ranked the number 10 program in the country,” Hardwick told Vandy on SI. “We’re trying to ascertain why, and more importantly, take some things back to our football club within Australia.”
As Hardwick looks around Vanderbilt’s practice facility, he sees a lot of his club in this Vanderbilt program and has connected with Lea as a result. The Suns were founded as an expansion team in 2009 and joined the Australian Football League in 2011. The coaching staff that walked around Vanderbilt’s campus on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon took over the club two seasons ago after it hadn’t “had a great deal of success.”
The Suns’ head coach admits his team is in a “challenging” market, is a “low cap” team and has struggled to get itself off the ground in a similar way to Lea’s program for the first three years of his build prior to the Commodores’ 7-6 finish in 2024 and subsequent 7-1 start to 2025.
Hardwick has built his organization up respectably in his own regard as his Suns’ team went to the club’s first ever final series and used Vanderbilt’s win over No. 1 as an example of an improbable upset being possible. What Vanderbilt did that night as its students carried the goalpost out of FirstBank Stadium–which Hardwick still remembers–was a moment similar to the one that Hardwick’s team would put together in that game as it went on to win its first finals game as heavy underdogs.
“We used that as inspiration,” Hardwick said of the Alabama win that was documented throughout the Netflix series. “We’ve sort of had an objective of looking at clubs in difficult environments and how those clubs have been successful, so hence here we are at Vanderbilt university.”
Hardwick says he and his staff were still in Cleveland after flying there from San Francisco during Vanderbilt’s eventual 17-10 win over No. 15 Missouri, but were watching with “bated breath” in hopes that Lea’s team would find a way to leave FirstBank Stadium with a win.
The game that Hardwick and company watched on Saturday has plenty of differences–including stoppages in play rather than continuous competition, a rectangular field instead of an oval-shaped one, 11 players on each team rather than 18 and padding relative to Australian football’s brutal style, that does limit high and low hits–but the core of what they and Lea are trying to build isn’t all that dissimilar.
“Though our sports are different, a lot of the problems and issues are human based and in that way there’s a lot of common ground,” Lea said. “Sometimes the best way to learn is to learn through the lens of a different game because it keeps it fresh.”
If Hardwick’s visit was refreshing to anyone, it was Vanderbilt punter Nick Haberer, who stood over on the sideline of Vanderbilt’s turf practice field longer than anyone in the minutes following its Tuesday practice. Perhaps his teammates were oblivious to the visit of the Australian football club, but the coaching staff’s presence reminded Haberer of home.
Haberer is a Sunshine Coast, Australia, native who says Hardwick is a “legendary coach” that he grew up watching. The Vanderbilt punter wanted to play for Hardwick while the current Suns’ head coach was the senior coach of Richmond Football Club for nearly the entirety of Haberer’s formative years. The story turned for Haberer when he took up punting, but it all came back to him on Tuesday.
“It’s a bit of a full-circle moment,” Haberer told Vandy on SI. “For him to use Vandy as a story to motivate their team and come here and visit me, it’s kind of a full-circle moment. It’s pretty special for that to happen.”
_(1)-b3e453dfe426b2dd4b83a12540ebdb37.jpeg "Joey Dwyer")
Joey Dwyer is the lead writer on Vanderbilt Commodores On SI. He found his first love in college sports at nearby Lipscomb University and decided to make a career of telling its best stories. He got his start doing a Notre Dame basketball podcast from his basement as a 14-year-old during COVID and has since aimed to make that 14-year-old proud. Dwyer has covered Vanderbilt sports for three years and previously worked for 247 Sports and Rivals. He contributes to Seth Davis' Hoops HQ, Southeastern 16 and Mainstreet Nashville.
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