Forget what you think you know about Jack Ginnivan. He could be Sam Mitchell’s smartest player

April 11, 2026 — 5:00am

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The remaking of Jack Ginnivan into the mould of the football club he grew up loving has not been without its visits back to the workshop. There have been setbacks and triumphs and no one in a leadership position at Hawthorn is brave enough to suggest there won’t be plenty more of both.

But as the 23-year-old prepared to fly into Adelaide Airport and run onto Adelaide Oval, which have both provided the backdrop for birds and aeroplanes among but a handful of his famous confrontations over his relatively short career, the inescapable conclusion is that Ginnivan has become an on-field success story. Off-field he might remain a risky prospect, but Jack Ginnivan the liability has not been spotted for more than a season.

One symbolic comparison to Ginnivan’s transformation from a clever half-forward to something far more serious and elite up the ground, while he still manages to behaviourally challenge his football club, is his podcast Ball Magnets – a joint project with his former teammate Tom Mitchell.

Over the journey there has been some self-indulgent banter over-ridden by increasingly intelligent football analysis, often led by Ginnivan at his whiteboard dissecting his beloved game. Hawthorn and Sam Mitchell pride themselves on providing wide boundaries and even stronger fences, so when Ginnivan said he wanted to become a game analyst because he thought it was something he could make a career of, the coach said yes.

All he asked was for no surprises, so it’s no surprise that Ginnivan reaches a line often where the fence has to be tightened. After over-explaining a Hawthorn strategy involving Carlton recently, the club told Ginnivan that discussing his own club was off the cards.

But the impression that the young player can go rogue and give up his club’s tactical secrets is overridden by the reality that club officials study, and at times edit, every podcast before it goes public.

It is a year since Mitchell dropped Ginnivan to the VFL over the Easter of 2025. The player was out of form, bereft of confidence and his attitude had dropped. But then the penny dropped as well, and after an elite performance with Box Hill down at Geelong, punctuated by an unannounced but self-imposed leadership role on the day, Ginnivan was quickly back.

His subsequent journey to the finals through the back half of the season was at least All-Australian squad worthy.

Further back, Ginnivan’s switch to Hawthorn on the last day of the 2023 trade period, in a deal essentially based around second-round pick swaps, now looks a poor decision from the Magpies, whose list management has since then come under regular and negative scrutiny.

Not contending, rebuilding or replenishing: What is Collingwood’s season about?

Then football boss Graham Wright remains adamant the Magpies wanted to keep Ginnivan, but the Hawks remain equally adamant his old club did not rate him highly enough. Having lured Bobby Hill from the Giants the previous year and gone on to win the premiership, Collingwood had the opportunity to take advantage of Lachie Schultz’s desire to come home from the west.

Wright has always taken responsibility for the call and wishes Ginnivan well. The Hawks, knowing the Magpies were now prioritising Schultz and that lifelong Hawks supporter Ginnivan felt – rightly or wrongly – under-valued, swooped.

Hawthorn was rebuilding on the run under the newish coach Mitchell and saw Ginnivan, with his on-field smarts and off-field behavioural issues, as high risk mitigated by high talent. As Mitchell and his recruiting team had long agreed, any club undergoing a rebuild had no choice but to take risks such as this one on the almost-21-year-old, whose on-field smarts had been mitigated by dumb decisions off it.

Ginnivan had started his final year at Collingwood with a two-match suspension and a strike under the old system after incriminating vision emerged of him with an illicit substance in a Torquay bathroom cubicle. There was a hint of the “poor me” in his official apology, which infuriated some Collingwood bosses.

He ended it with a premiership – albeit his own contribution on the day was below average – and an instruction from Craig McRae to, “read the room, Jack” after spending grand final eve at the Moonee Valley races.

All Mitchell and his team wanted off-field – like the podcast – were no surprises, and Ginnivan complied early and often. He asked the club in his first season whether or not he could go to the Caulfield races and, in September, the pub before a final.

But it’s hard to judge which misdemeanour in his first year with the Hawks was more damaging. Certainly, the biggest fallout followed the player’s decision during the 2024 finals series to message his former teammate Brodie Grundy “see u in 14 days” on social media. Hawthorn had to play Port Adelaide in a semi-final before one of those teams met Sydney in the prelim.

Mitchell dismissed criticism from his former premiership teammate and captain Luke Hodge at the time when Hodge asserted, “One thing you don’t do is give ammunition to the opposition”. But behind the scenes, it was a different story. Both Ginnivan’s senior teammates and Mitchell reinforced the consequences of the player’s so-called online banter.

The fallout from that one-kick Port victory continued this week when Port’s former coach Ken Hinkley – who admitted he made full use of Ginnivan’s faux pas – revealed he still felt used and completely unsupported by the AFL after it fined him $20,000 for taunting Ginnivan and then promoting the incident at last year’s Gather Round.

Hinkley made a public apology at the time, but has never spoken directly to Ginnivan. The latter more recently sent the former Port coach a cheeky message via a mutual acquaintance and relived Hinkley’s aeroplane gesture last season in a Port-Hawthorn game.

Then in October, after the Hawthorn best and fairest night, Ginnivan and teammate Nick Watson failed to show at a junior football clinic. Some 80 children whose parents had shelled out $65 a head were reportedly left in tears. One Hawthorn boss, who did not want to be quoted, said Mitchell told Ginnivan, “Don’t do that again”.

Although the club hadn’t organised the clinic, it promised to reschedule it, although only Watson attended because Ginnivan was out of the country. The club – which has a tendency to knock back newspaper interview requests for Ginnivan, and did again this week – has scheduled multiple clinics for Ginnivan since, and he has complied.

But it remained a serious cross against his name, coupled with the Grundy Instagram post, compounded by a poor start in the first six weeks of 2025. Ginnivan’s transformation came at a good time for him.

Since then, he has thrived under the Mitchell philosophy based less on McRae’s system-based mantra and more focused on unearthing the strength of the individual. Reading between the lines, there was more symbolism in one Ball Magnets conversation with Tom Mitchell about the joy of being allowed to wear a coloured headband after leaving Collingwood.

Mitchell’s ascendance as senior coach in 2022 came with a message to his off-field lieutenants that the game would only get faster and the Hawks must recruit accordingly. Mitchell wanted Ginnivan for his game smarts.

Not contending, rebuilding or replenishing: What is Collingwood’s season about?

In turn, Ginnivan has turned from a half-forward into a wingman and so much more. His body shape has changed – an attribute he happily paraded post-game on Easter Monday – and his ability to read the play in the crucial final term of the one-point win over Geelong helped earn him four coaches’ votes. He might lack pace and not boast the biggest engine, but when the game is on, Mitchell has said, the 2022 Anzac medallist is the smartest player on the team.

Hawthorn football boss Rob McCartney told 3AW on Easter Monday that the new rules and removal of the bounce mean that centre ball-ups have never been more important. Ginnivan has not only personally flourished, but he has read the new movement from the centre better than most, notably against Sydney in round two when he starred.

Ginnivan might remain a work in progress but the progress he has worked had to achieve deserves to be acknowledged.

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© Brisbane Times