Simon Bone – Wodonga, Wodonga Raiders
Simon Bone didn’t take long to stamp his own mark in the Ovens and Murray league at the club where his father Mick was a household name.
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The talented rover broke into Wodonga’s senior ranks as a teenager in 1985 and two years later was one of the league’s brightest prospects as the Bulldogs stormed to a grand final rout of Lavington under first-year coach Jeff Gieschen.
Bone stood up on the big stage and booted three goals in a starring role after earlier in the season playing in the country championships winning Ovens and Murray line-up.
After stints at his dad’s former VFL club Collingwood, Brunswick and East Ballarat, Bone returned to the O and M and joined the fledgling Wodonga Raiders, who had joined the competition in 1989.
Widely regarded as one of the league’s most damaging small men, Bone won back-to-back best and fairests for the Raiders in 1994-95.
In the 1994 season, the cheeky and courageous Bone finished one vote shy of joining Tim Scott and John Kingston in a three-way tie in the Morris Medal and backed up 12 months later with another top-three finish.
The Raiders were also emerging as an O and M force in the mid-1990s and after going down to Albury in the 1997 grand final, the league’s latest arrivals went one better the following year with a decisive win over Lavington.
Bone captained the historic victory and his premiership team-mates included the Raiders first O and M Hall of Famer, Stephen Clarke.
Bone took over as coach of Raiders from Darren Harris in 2000 and a preliminary final finish in 2001 was the high-point of his first stint in the role.
His competitive juices kept flowing and Bone coached Tallangatta and District league club Kiewa-Sandy Creek to a premiership before returning for another one-year stint in charge of Raiders in 2014.
