A horrific injury cut short his career. Now Luke Vella is helping future stars begin theirs
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It’s Friday, April 4, 2014, and inside the away dressing sheds of the old Sydney Football Stadium, young rugby league player Adam Elliott turns to his Bulldogs teammates for the time-honoured rev-up.
“C’mon boys, we’ve got to lift to get back into this,” he urges his side.
They are heavily behind against the Roosters in a National Youth Competition match. In a pocket of the room, one of the team’s smallest players makes a promise to himself.
“I’ll try to make a statement here,” Luke Vella thinks.
The Bulldogs run back onto the field ready to kick-off. The first collision of any half is generally the biggest: think Mark Carroll and Paul Harragon hurtling towards each other with no sense of self-preservation; or James Graham and Sam Burgess in the 2014 grand final.
On this day, Vella decides he’s going to run faster than anyone and provide an instant lift to his teammates.
Bulldogs Jersey Flegg coach Luke Vella.Credit: Rhett Wyman
“I shot out of the line from the kick-off and I got my head in the wrong position,” he recalls. “I went too low and caught [the attacker’s] hip. I was in and out of consciousness on the field and on the stretcher coming off, and then I was straight to hospital … That stuff is a bit of a blur.”
Less than two weeks before Vella’s career-ending tackle, Alex McKinnon suffered his catastrophic injury in an NRL game in Melbourne, leaving him a quadriplegic. The rugby league world had barely come to terms with what had happened to the promising Newcastle back-rower when another junior player’s life was turned upside down.
The doctors told Vella he had suffered a brachial plexus injury. It meant three of his nerves down the left side of his body had been torn, with no messages being sent from his brain to his arm. It is similar to the injury suffered by former Wests Tigers star Simon Dwyer, whose career was cut short by a tackle in 2011.
What followed were years of rehabilitation for Vella. Five marathon surgeries with the hope of getting some flexion in his left elbow. Countless hospital visits.
“There’s one I remember distinctly,” Vella says. “I was in ICU, but I had to stay in an incubated room where the temperature was over 36 degrees because I had a skin flap attached to my arm which had to be heated. There was no TV, and nurses were coming in and rolling me over to go to the toilet.”
He pauses.
“I try to put that to the back of my mind, but when I think about it, it’s pretty horrific if I’m honest. I was in a pretty dark place after the injury.”
Vella tells the story sitting down among the blue seats of the Belmore Sportsground. In a couple of hours, he’s going to train the Bulldogs’ Jersey Flegg side in preparation for the grand final against the Roosters at CommBank Stadium on Sunday.
Their coach never got the chance to see how far he could go with his playing career, but he’s determined to give the next batch of Bulldogs every chance to make the most of their own.
Unconsciously, he shows them what hurdles they might overcome just by practising a training drill. Vella will often jump in at dummy half. When the ball clears the ruck, he picks it up with just his right hand and rifles a one-handed pass Cameron Smith or Danny Buderus would be happy with.
“This club is very, very special to me,” Vella says. “I played junior league grand finals here when I was nine years old and I’m still here coaching Jersey Flegg at 29. I’ll get emotional if I keep talking about it. They helped me through the darkest time of my life and to come out the other side, I can’t thank them enough for what they’ve done for me.”
Vella rolls into training in his modified Mitsubishi with a steering wheel usually found in a forklift. The blinkers have to be attached to the wheel so he can use them. When he orders a steak from a restaurant, he asks the chef to cut up the meat for him. Every pair of shoes he buys is a size too small, so he can tuck the laces in.
Recently, he’s started playing in a physical disability rugby league side and has been amazed at how much joy others get out of the sport.
Luke Vella at Belmore Sportsground.Credit: Rhett Wyman
“There are things you get frustrated with,” Vella says. “But that gives me a sense of, ‘What have you got to whinge about?’
“I look at it, and I could have been a lot worse. There was an injury to a guy I used to play against, Kurt Drysdale [who was left a paraplegic after an on-field accident]. I look at him and look at myself and think, ‘What are you worried about? That could have been you. Just get on with life’.”
Life will bring the chance on Sunday to provide some happiness for a club that has been in a rut for longer than their supporters want to remember.
This year, the NRL squad’s training standards and culture have been questioned, but Vella’s Jersey Flegg players get up at 4am on some days to arrive for a 5am weights session, go to work all day, and then return to the club in the evening for a field workout with the coach.
In between his work with the next generation of Bulldogs stars, Vella coaches students at Westfields Sports High. They won the national championship this month. Bulldogs NRL coach Cameron Ciraldo has an open-door policy, which allows Vella to sit in on meetings, and he regularly talks to general manager Phil Gould about the game.
Could he be a future NRL coach?
“I’ve got time up my sleeve, which is good,” Vella says. “If I want to challenge myself, that’s the pinnacle of the sport. I think there will come a time when I’d like to push forward to that. But these kids buy into what the club is about. I think the club is about hard work, resilience and turning up when your back is against the wall.”
If that’s the case, then they’ve found the right coach.
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