The new first grade coach last coached the Demons seniors in 2013, when he was in charge of reserve grade.

More recently he led the Dubbo under 12s side to a minor premiership and grand final appearance against the Cowra Blues and coached the Central West AFL junior rep team.

Now he's been selected to lead the Demons in the upcoming 2020 Central West AFL season and work is already underway that has Smith feeling positive about the upcoming campaign.

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"I'm very very excited, I'm a bit past my glory days, but I used to go down and train with the boys last year and we formed a pretty good bond at the time," Smith said.

Smith jumped at the opportunity opened up by the departure of Shayne Wilesmith, who guided the Demons to the finals last season before they were eliminated in the semi-finals by the Bathurst Giants.

While the demons showed genuine improvement last year, they've still yet to experience success come finals time and Smith wants to see things change in order to give the side that last push.

"I want to go back to the Demons of old, which was really tough, aggressive footy, I think we lost that over the last couple of years and I want to become more unpredictable," Smith said.

"We've got a really skilled side, with three or four of the best players in the comp, so I want to mix things up and do things differently this year."

"There's some really great sides out there in Orange and Bathurst and we know where we sit and if we keep doing what we're doing, we'll keep finishing third, fourth or fifth, but I genuinely believe if we're unpredictable we can shoot for that top two and compete in the finals."

With a likely influx of new players thanks to the success of the local AFL 9s competition, Smith is also eager to see if the reserve grades and women sides can make a return.

"I think it was something like 90 people who competed in that, so hopefully a few of those will come on down to training, it's a big jump up from the 9s competition to a full blown season of AFL, but if we can get a few, that'd be fantastic," Smith said.

"I would love to get the reserves off the ground, that would mean more people at training genuinely fighting for spots in first grade, numbers have been slightly down the last year or two, so everyone gets a game, but the fact that we might have thirty or forty people and there'll be genuine contention for spots is really exciting."

Smith, who's been running fitness and conditioning training with members of last year's team for a little over a month, says numbers have already been promising.

"We've been training for six to eight weeks and we've had about fourteen people training every time which is fantastic for this time of year."

"I was training with a few boys just to roll the legs over and it grew from there, we're getting some new faces in as well, it's great, I've seen over twenty different faces at training already."

Smith also welcomed the return of the 9s competition early in 2020, when a few extra rounds will be played to make up for rounds that were missed in 2019.

"That'll help with our fitness just that bit more having the 9s, hopefully that momentum rolls straight into our training at that point," Smith said.

The Demons pre-season will begin in earnest in February and the club is optimistic about fielding three teams senior teams in the competition in 2020.