It is pure football romance to suggest that Lenny Hayes is the one who got away and who now has returned home to join the band of orange and grey pioneers working to create a premiership built from Sydney's inner west.

But the symbolism is impossible to ignore, even weighed against the ongoing challenges facing the AFL's youngest club as it heads into its ninth clash with the in-form Swans.

Hayes remembers an entirely different SCG as a boy watching his beloved Swans with his father. "I never thought I'd see two teams in Sydney," he said. "I would go with my Dad and we'd sit wherever we wanted. There were never too many there. I never thought there'd be a club out west.

"When Plugger came it started to grow a bit over '95-'96 but it's changed so much. Even in the short time the Giants have been around, they've already done a great job in Canberra where the game was really starting to struggle."

Hayes grew up in outer Sydney's Eastwood where he played football for Pennant Hills and first left home as a 16-year-old to live with a host family in Canberra. There he spent two years with the-then TAC side the NSW ACT Canberra Rams before being famously overlooked by the Swans in the 1998 national draft, taken by St Kilda at pick No.11.

Two decades, 297 games and three Trevor Barker Medals later, the much-loved Saint has returned home; a 36-year-old nursing a coaching ambition after working in the AFL's football department for a year as the recipient of the Ron Evans Scholarship.

Hayes has moved with his now heavily pregnant wife Tara and young son to Hunters Hill, a 15-minute drive from where he grew up. Recently joined at the club by another AFL house product, umpires boss-turned-Giants football chief Wayne Campbell, the Hayes appointment proved timely for both club and assistant defence coach.

Greater Western Sydney boss Dave Matthews bristles at the ongoing perception that some of those early club pioneers have proved a transient group, but it is true the Giants environment has proved a difficult and not entirely co-ordinated operation too often during its short history.

That includes ongoing tension between the club and the AFL, with the game's governing body continuing to pressure the Giants administration to create a powerful footprint through Sydney's western corridor while simultaneously pleading austerity and tightening the purse strings.

The Simon Katich experiment in football operations proved short-lived and was one of five football department departures last year while key executives have often commuted from Melbourne and others relocated to Canberra. List manager Steven Silvagni, who departed almost 18 months ago, has still not been replaced.

But Hayes, who reportedly declared his aim to one day become a senior coach during the Giants interviews, remains delighted to be home near his siblings and back in a club environment. Most summer weekends were spent at the Avoca Beach home of mother Elizabeth, with Tara due to give birth in about three weeks, around the time the Giants take on St Kilda.

The low-key Hayes, who still shudders at the attention he inadvertently caused by announcing his retirement and then playing out the final weeks of the 2014 season, enjoys the anonymity of coaching in a non-traditional footy town and the controlled style of his senior coach Leon Cameron.

He remains in touch with his former mentor Grant Thomas and still seeks advice from Ross Lyon, who text-messaged him upon Hayes winning the GWS job: "Welcome to the wild world of coaching."

Hayes said: "I'm still not sure if I'm ever going to be good enough. I have no problem with hard work, but there is so much stuff that goes on that the players have no idea about."

That the Saints took Hayes in the 1998 draft, in the same year Mark McVeigh went to Essendon as another high pick, became a source of ongoing embarrassment for the Swans as they and the AFL were facing an on-going struggle to develop and promote Australian Rules football in Sydney.

Hayes was told by his Rams under-18 coach at the time that the 1998 Morrish Medallist was perhaps a victim of over scrutiny, with the Sydney club having regularly seen at close hand what he could and couldn't do.

"They took Jude Bolton, Nick Fosdyke and Ryan Fitzgerald that year," said Hayes. "So looking back, I don't think they'd have two many regrets." Nonetheless, four years later the club held pick No.5 in the 2002 draft and debated whether to take Jarryd McVeigh or Steven Salopek.

Then football boss Andrew Ireland's only comment to his recruiting team was that, if all things were equal, under no circumstances overlook the local kid.

"Now the development system is set up completely differently and it's absolutely crucial we keep growing these academies. I know they've been talked about a lot but unless you understand the challenges it's difficult to make a judgment."

It is fitting given how many clubs would have loved to clone Lenny Hayes that his new boss Wayne Campbell would love to unearth a similar home-grown product. Sydney's west and outer west remains its greatest talent challenge.

Campbell, whose priority is to appoint a list manager, referred to the impact caused by his last big play as the AFL's umpires' boss when referring to his desire to find players of Hayes' quality from the Giants' backyard. That was when South Australian rookie Eleni Glouftsis was selected to officiate a NAB Challenge game and suddenly the competition saw a significant increase in women candidates.

"I saw first-hand through Eleni what a trailblazer can do," said Campbell.