CHRIS COLEMAN Class

Of 1987

Unlike many of the people profiled in these pages, I wasn’t an Eddies boy from Grade 4 or Year 7. I started there late in 1985 for my final term of Year 10, but the ensuing two and a bit years certainly helped shape me into the man I am today.

You could almost call my time at St Edmund’s a ‘condensed’ version. It included all the usual stuff… camp at Tuross, going on a retreat, nearly setting myself on fire in the chem lab, walkathons, and sport, although - ironically, given what my future would hold, not rugby. We’d moved to Canberra from Melbourne, so the rugby codes were very foreign beasts to me.

It was also a time where I made many friendships that last until this day. And even among the class of ’87 members I don’t see or speak to regularly, there’s a definite bond. Two minutes into a conversation and it’s like the intervening decades have evaporated.

One of the areas where the College shaped my life was definitely in my career. At the 30th anniversary reunion, one conversation turned to how few people were still doing what they said they wanted to during our College years. The estimates varied, but they were all in single-digits, and I was one of that small number.

One night, a couple of weeks before the end of Year 10, I phoned into the nightly countdown show on 2CC (in those days, one of the hottest music stations in the country) to request a song. I cracked some sort of lame joke, which the DJ recorded and replayed on air. The next day, it seemed everyone had heard it. For the new kid in the school, the sudden burst of popularity planted the seed. I wanted to be on radio.

Much to the dismay of various Maths, Physics, and Chemistry teachers, the kid who was an average English student (at best) had set his heart on a career where command of language was important.

My parents, and other teachers realised there was no point trying to talk me into doing something more sensible. Careers advisor extraordinaire, Ian Walton, gave me two pieces of advice: Be good at what you choose to do, and always look to be better at it. And be prepared to take an opportunity when it comes up.

Working in radio, like all media, requires more than ability to turn into a career, it needs luck. Being the right person, applying for the right job, at the right time, is crucial. Of course, I decided to increase the difficulty and set my sights on being a sports broadcaster.

After Year 12 where I sometimes spent more time doing harness racing shifts on 2SSS, Canberra’s now-defunct racing radio station, than studying or doing assignments, I decided on a gap year. (That ‘gap’ is now into its fourth decade.) A series of day jobs followed, but nights and weekends were spent on community radio.

2SSS eventually got tired of me hanging around the studios and offered me a job as sports coordinator in 1990 for the princely wage of $11,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but it was a full-time role, and looking back, for a 20-year-old, a job I was eminently unqualified for!

Commercial radio jobs followed. A short contract in Albury was followed by moves to Orange in 1992, Coffs Harbour in 1993, back to Orange in 1996, Wagga Wagga in 1998, Goulburn, then Muswellbrook in 1999, before the ABC embarked on a massive recruitment drive in 2001, and hired me to move to Dubbo.

On the personal side, I married in 1992, and my son Rhys was born in 1993, but that marriage ended in 1999.

My connections to Eddies continued through this time. Every few months the studio line would ring, and it’d be a fellow class of ’87 veteran passing through the area who’d heard me and wanted to say hi.

I worked in many roles – music presenter, program director, news editor, the list goes on – and interviewed people as diverse as prime ministers, state premiers, stunt pilots and even Sir Bob Geldof.

A second trip to the altar in 2003 was followed by a move with the ABC to Wagga Wagga as a regional manager in 2004. Working for the ABC opened many doors, with regular opportunities to fill in on programs in Sydney and Canberra, as well as state and national shows.

That old advice about taking opportunities and getting better at what you do must have stuck, along with the importance of helping others. I became a part of the ABC’s emergency broadcasting team, and helped out communities during floods, storms, cyclones and bushfires in several states.

Living in Wagga, with two stepsons playing the Brumbies provincial program, meant many regular trips to Canberra, and the frequency of those trips increased when the reforming Australian Baseball League awarded a licence to the Canberra Cavalry. During the club’s second season they asked me if I would like to become ‘the voice of the Cavalry’ and do the commentary for the live streams of their games.

Over the decade since, I called hundreds of baseball games, including the Cavalry’s national title in 2013 in Canberra, alongside fellow class of ’87 member, and Team Australia player, Phil Brassington, and the remarkable Asia Series win later that year in Taiwan.

This was followed by the ABC choosing me to head up their national radio call of the Major League Baseball series from the Sydney Cricket Ground in 2014, where I met and interviewed the greatest sports broadcaster of all time, Vin Scully. He then, in a surreal moment, started asking me questions about the SCG for info to use in his broadcasts to the USA.

Someone at MLB heard me in 2015 and even suggested one of my home run calls was ‘the greatest call of all time.

Despite all this, and awards for covering basketball and motorsport in addition to baseball, the dream of an ongoing commentary job still proved elusive.

In early 2016, an ABC restructure saw my job disappear, but opened the door to my career going full circle, and I wound up back in Canberra, at 2CC, but as the drive show host, taking the talkback calls. And still calling sport as a side gig!

In 2018, after more than 32 years as in broadcast, I joined the public service in a media liaison role. The lure of ongoing, steady employment, and the ability to spoil my grandchildren was too strong.

And just days after starting in that role, I was offered the job as lead commentator for the brand new Canberra Raiders rugby league coverage on Mix 106.3. Finally! The ongoing sports job. Even if it was on a part-time basis.

It might seem a long way from asking Rex Purcell in 1987 if Eddies had ever thought about having someone do commentary of the First XV rugby games, to winning a Commercial Radio Award in 2022 for Best Sports Event Coverage, but it’s not really. It’s all about taking pride in what you are passionate about.

They are values instilled in me at Eddies, and still have today.