This year, 26 district sporting legends are being inducted to the hall of fame, honour roll and junior honour roll categories in the Greater Shepparton Sports Hall of Fame. The News is featuring stories on each of the inductees in the lead-up to the induction ceremony on August 6. Today's News isports reporter Rodney Woods speaks to Adem Yze, who is being inducted to the hall of fame.
As one of the first footballers of Albanian heritage to take their skills to AFL level, Adem Yze played at the highest level for 13 years, playing 271 games and kicking 234 goals.
Since his retirement in 2008, Yze has spent time as a playing assistant coach at VFL club Box Hill, returned to play in Goulburn Valley League, where his career started, and more recently has performed roles as assistant coach at AFL clubs Hawthorn and now Melbourne, the team he played his entire career for.
Yze achieved many things throughout his career, including being named as an All-Australian in 2002, a year he finished third in the Brownlow Medal and represented Australia in the International Rules series.
He also won Melbourne's best-and-fairest award in 2001 and was a member of Melbourne's grand final team that lost to Essendon in 2000.
But one of his biggest achievements, a run of 226 consecutive games, was clouded in controversy as he closed in on the record of most consecutive games by a player at the level.
As Yze approached the record held by the late Jim Stynes (244 consecutive games), a below-par performance to start the 2007 season led to speculation Yze was saving himself for the record rather than performing at his normal high standard.
“I had a conversation with (then coach) Neale Daniher after that game, entering the season the media were beating it up about whether I would break the record,” Yze told The News in 2018.
“We lost round one, the whole focus was on me and whether I should be dropped or not andNeale was wanting to know how I was dealing with the pressure.
“I said ‘If I deserve to play I will, if not then I don't'.
“In the end, I got the call on Thursday and they thought it was better to not play me and I'll come back the next week — which looking at it now as a coach, it was the right thing to do.
“I would rather miss a game than people think that I was backing out of the contest to reach a record that I didn’t really care about.”
Post his playing career, Yze was an assistant coach under Hawthorn coach Alistair Clarkson for eight years and now is helping out the Melbourne Football Club's resurgence up the ladder.
But despite admitting in 2018 in an article with The News, he had ambitions "to go as far as I can in coaching,” that wasn't always the case.
“It is a funny situation, I never really thought I would until I was involved in the leadership group at Melbourne,” Yze said in that 2018 interview.
“It was there where I started helping out some of the younger players and then I started enjoying the development side of things.”
Yze’s break, or moment of luck, came when Clarkson was admitted to hospital after a back injury that was later diagnosed as Guillain–Barre syndrome in May 2014.
Then assistant coach Brendon Bolton became the interim senior coach, allowing Yze to fill Bolton’s void as a line coach.
“It was a little fortunate, but the jump into the actual coaches box struck a nerve and from then I knew I wanted to be involved a lot more.”