He was still getting up at 5.30 am and working until 5 pm for five or six days a week in construction.
Magner also got himself ready for pre-season training, which worked out well, as he was invited to join in St Kilda’s pre-season from the outset, as he explained.
“I was working, but training really hard. You don’t get as much time and you don’t get any time during the day, so I had to fit it all in during the evening - going to gym and doing running sessions.
“I didn’t know I was going to get a pre-season with St Kilda. I only found out with a couple of weeks to go that I was going to get it. I was lucky I’d actually prepared myself.”
Magner’s connection with St Kilda was through its alliance with Sandringham in the VFL. The Saints had invited several Zebras for pre-season training, which he saw as a golden opportunity.
“St Kilda had some new people come in like [head of football] Chris Pelchen, and a few other guys were pretty keen to get a couple of guys who had had better years at Sandringham down to train and to get the relationship a bit better,” he said.
“They put it to us as ‘you’ve got a little shot at making it’, but it was more to improve the relationship between the alignment.
“I didn’t really look at it like that. I tried to do everything I could to impress them, which in turn, impressed Melbourne. It worked out really well in the end.”
But Magner said he had no idea that the Demons would secure him, recalling his first contact with the red and blue.
“The first time I spoke to anyone at Melbourne was to Mark Neeld, three minutes after the rookie draft,” he said.
“The pre-season there [at St Kilda] was good. It gave me a little bit of a competition there, and it showed me the level that you need to be at. It was a good lead in to getting to Melbourne, so it wasn’t just a shock to the system, straight into an AFL pre-season. I look at it as a good thing that I went there.”
Magner said he found both clubs “pretty similar to be honest”.
“A lot of the days were similar. You’d have the main sessions on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday … but there were differences in game plans, but in general there wasn’t too much different from St Kilda to Melbourne,” he said.
Magner said adapting to a new club after having undertaken the early stages of pre-season in another environment was akin to “your first day of school”.
“It’s tough early. The first couple of weeks, you’re trying to get to know [people], but lucky I knew Nathan Jones and I’d played against Col Sylvia, so it made it a lot easier for me,” he said.
“It would’ve been a lot harder for an 18 year-old to come in, but adapting - it took me two or three weeks to adapt and find my place.
“I hurt my ankle early, which didn’t help me, but I did everything I could as far as rehab and to get myself out on the track. I did enough to impress the coaches once I was out on the track.”
Fast forward until the end of the 2012 season, and Magner finished with 17 matches to his name - a fine effort, considering he only joined Melbourne last December.
But Magner said elevating his game from the VFL to AFL was the biggest challenge he had encountered in his recent journey.
“It’s massive. A lot of guys say that it couldn’t be that big, but there are parts of it which are very similar to AFL. The physicality is pretty similar. In the VFL, the guys are often the same size and even bigger, but the speed of the game in the AFL is just another level,” he said.
“The amount of ground that you cover in an AFL game is so much more compared to what I was doing last year. Last year, I could get away with a lot, because I was one of the better players in my team, so I didn’t really worry so much about defensive running.
“It’s a lot of stuff that you don’t see on camera necessarily that’s off the ball - and that’s the biggest thing. The amount of ground you have to cover and the intensity that you do it at.”
Now that the mature age rookie has had a taste of the highest level, he wants to have more than just one season.
“I’m a real thinker, and I want to be playing AFL every week - definitely. It does get frustrating, but you’ve just got to focus on what you can do and not worry about it,” he said.
“Next year, I’ll be aiming to play as many games as I can. When I came to the club, all I wanted to do was play one game and then I played one. And then you play five and then you keep reassessing.
“At the end of the year, it was a little bit disappointing, but everyone who speaks to you … even Neeldy, the coaching staff and my wife, they said ‘have a look at the big picture - you’ve played 17 games and be happy with that and build on it for next year’. “
Magner says he knows he has to keep fighting every week to play at the highest level, and that will be his attitude entering 2013.
“I’m really excited for next year. I feel like I can take my game to another level and I’ll be doing everything this pre-season again. I want to be cementing my spot in the team next year,” he said.
“Getting every session in and getting your body right from session to session - you can’t afford to have niggles that you’re not treating and missing a week or two here and there.
“You’ve got to be giving your best for the season ahead.”
