Greg McFadden grew up in the Balmain area, but represented Cronulla in the NSW 1st grade competitions. He received his first Australian men's water polo cap in 1986 and was a prominent member of the Australian Olympic team at Barcelona (1992) and accrued 189 caps for Australia. 'Dumper' competed in one World Championship at Rome (1994), and also participated in two FINA World Cup tournaments at Berlin (1989) and Athens (1993), where the Australians won their first-ever FINA bronze medal. On the NSW scene, Greg helped Cronulla win 12 1st grade premierships from 1983 to 1999, and played 11 consecutive National Championships with New South Wales from 1985 to 1995, the last three as captain, to gain seven national titles over that impressive span.

He was also able to guide Cronulla to five National League titles from 1994 to 1999. After retiring as an active player Greg turned his hand to coaching and has made a huge international impact. He has been Australia's womens single most successful coach. He was the mastermind three FINA World League medals, a World Championship silver medal at Melbourne (2007), and World Cup gold medal at Tianjin (2006), as well as the most recent Olympic Games bronze medal in Beijing (2008). Despite his casual approach, he is a highly disciplined, organised and effective team coach.

A team can learn as much from their losses as from their wins, according to Australian women’s water polo coach Greg McFadden. The Australian women’s water polo team was defeated 6–5bythe highly fancied Americanism the final of the world championships in Melbourne earlier this year. McFadden sees this result not so much as a loss but a learning experience. ‘Even going in, the Americans were, in my eyes, still the team to beat. We didn’t play the US at the World Cup last year as they got knocked out in the semis. I don’t believe you’re the best until you’ve beaten everyone and we hadn’t been tested against them in a major competition for two years,’ he said.’ Afterwards I told the girls to go up and hold their heads high and to be proud of their achievement, as it wasn’t every day you win a silver medal. In a month or two we’ll exchange emails, we’ll talk, we’ll sit down with individual players and we’ll analyse how the game went. After reflection, we know that we will take a lot more out of that game than the Americans will.’ When the former Olympic representative took over the reins of the Australian women’s team in 2005, he took on a squad that had only five women remaining from the Athens Olympics campaign and none from the team that won gold at the Sydney Olympics.

The squad had an average age of 22 and most had little international experience McFadden’s first goal was to increase the depth of skill of the squad. He has done so by changing the team from tournament to tournament. He said this has created an atmosphere of competition, both within and around the team. ‘At every training session everyone’s trying to get better. The girls are challenging for their positions and this means we’re going to have options in all positions.’ McFadden draws on his own international experience when preparing his players for tournaments. He was an Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) water polo player who represented Australia at the Olympics. It was while he was with the AIS that he began coaching second, third and occasionally first-grade matches with his home club, Cronulla. His AIS coach, Charles Turner, saw coaching potential in McFadden and nominated him for an AIS coaching scholarship. McFadden joked that it was ‘probably because I wasn’t good enough as a player’ but then added seriously that it was more likely because he had stepped up and taken on responsibility for club coaching. After completing his two-year scholarship, Turner took McFadden on as an assistant coach and he combined his coaching and playing until retiring in 1996. He then moved to Sydney to become the NSW Institute of Sport’s head coach, coaching both the men’s and women’s squads. He moved back to Canberra in 2001 to take on the junior men’s development program. He was assistant women’s coach in 2004and won the role of national women’s coach in 2005.It was when he became responsible for the women’s program at the NSW Institute of Sport that McFadden says he discovered he needed to be in a ‘different headspace’ when coaching women. ‘It’s been my experience that women are happy to impress you. Men think they know it all. One thing that I do have to approach differently is that women will immediately do what you tell them to do but they’ll overlook other things on the way, so it takes them time to adapt if a different situation arises during a match. I have to think more about coaching for flexibility.’ McFadden cites Turner and his Cronulla coach Bruce Falson as major influences on his coaching career. ‘Bruce’s style was to ask everyone in the team, “How do you think we should go about this game?”, and then he’d weigh up everyone’s thoughts and say, “Here’s what we’re going to do”. Me, I don’t do it quite the same way. I do ask the senior players but some of them are reluctant at times. I do like to listen to players but some may say I’m strong willed.’ McFadden also says he is inspired and influenced by coaches of other sports, including Vince Lombardi, the US football coach, Wayne Bennett, coach of the Brisbane Broncos rugby league team, Rod McQueen, coach of the Wallabies, US basketball coach Phil Jackson, and hockey coaches Frank Murray and Barry Dancer. When he was first appointed head coach, McFadden said he sat down with Dancer and now considers this meeting as ‘the best three hours I could have ever invested as a coach’. ‘I had heard that Barry was running his program in a similar way to the way I wanted to run mine and I wanted to get his thoughts. Being open to that and having the opportunity to speak with him was the best thing I could have done.’

McFadden is quick to laugh and is often self-deprecating, confessing that the current women’s water polo squad might see him as a bit of a ‘lunatic’ who is’ quick to fly off the handle’. But there is no doubting his professionalism and his results speak for themselves. He describes himself as a passionate coach who is honest with his players‘ whether they like it or not’.

‘Some of the players tell me that they don’t like it when I take the calm and passive approach as they liken it to when they get in big trouble with their dad ... their dad becomes mad at them and doesn’t talk because they have let him down. ’McFadden has sat down with his players and outlined a four-year plan that culminates with a gold medal at Beijing.

While he is focused on the 2008 Olympics, he is not ruling out shooting for gold at London 2012, ‘or even with the men wherever the Olympics are after that, and then I’ll retire,’ he said lightly, but you get the feeling that McFadden will be involved with the sport he feels so passionately about for many years to come.

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