GEELONG Falcons duo Jack Pickett and Noah Williams have been given a taste of life in the AFL, joining the Cats for preseason training as they eye this year\u2019s national draft.<\/p>\n
Pickett (Torquay) and Williams (St Joseph\u2019s) are both members of the 2026 AFL National Academy and have hit the track with Geelong this month as part of their training program.<\/p>\n
The valuable opportunity comes as both players enter their top-age under-18 season, with their sights firmly set on becoming AFL players later this year.<\/p>\n
At 193cm, Pickett is a strong tall forward and kicked 31 goals from his eight matches with the Falcons\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n
As he trains with the Cats, he will learn plenty from arguably the AFL\u2019s best key forward in Jeremy Cameron as he looks to make his mark in his draft year.<\/p>\n
Williams is a speedy midfielder who recently won the best on ground award for Team Boak \u2013 named after Port Adelaide great and Torquay local Travis \u2013 in the annual under-17 Futures match on the MCG.<\/p>\n
He will look to pick the brains of Cats guns such as Bailey Smith and Max Holmes to fine-tune his craft ahead of the season.<\/p>\n
The two are not the only Falcons who have had a glimpse at an AFL preseason, with various other players such as flying defender Ben Rongdit (Colac) joining in as part of the Next Generation Academy program.<\/p>\n
Rongdit was eligible for last year\u2019s draft, but was unfortunately overlooked after he suffered an ACL injury which forced him out for the majority of the season.<\/p>\n
As he recovers this year, Rongdit will rejoin the Falcons program as an under-19 player and will look to keep his AFL dream alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GEELONG Falcons duo Jack Pickett and Noah Williams have been given a taste of life in the AFL,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-450531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}