November 27, 2010
Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna with young players Sam Day, Tom Lynch, Dion Prestia, Josh Caddy, Harley Bennell and David Swallow. Photo: Sebastian Costanzo
THEY all know the numbers by heart. ''It feels like we've been here for longer than two days …'' says Tom Lynch, Gold Coast's No. 11 draft pick, as he wanders back to his new club's change rooms, sweaty and red-faced after a wrestling session out on the oval. ''In 130 days we'll be running out to play clubs who have been around more than 100 years,'' adds Travis Auld, from the chief executive's office. ''It's starting to feel very serious.'' And then there is the coach.
On one of the whiteboards in Guy McKenna's office, he has scribbled a lengthy equation. The Gold Coast will share 484 games among its players in the 2011 season. There are 14 Suns aged 23 and over, and another 38 younger than that. The coaches believe they will get a combined 180 games out of the senior players and another 144 games from their 12 best juniors, taking the total tally to 324 of those 484 games.
''That leaves us with 160 more games to get into players, and what that means is a lot of our 'little drowned rats,' as I call them, are going to have to play eight games each. It means we're going to have 42 players who all play more than eight games for the season, and it means we're going to have a very young team, but that's the choice we've made,'' said McKenna. ''We've gone for talent over age, and so Jack Hutchins, who's only 18, is going to play at full-back next year. If it's not him, it's Karmichael Hunt and if Nathan Bock goes down, it's both of them out there at once. That's it. That's the list, and that's how we'll have to do it.''
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McKenna had his first, full list together just after lunchtime on Monday - minus Hunt and a few others, off doing some testing - but you would never have picked it as a significant moment. Gary Ablett was there, reporting for his first day, but he slotted into the group easily, just another face. So did Campbell Brown, so did Jared Brennan, so did recent local recruit Joel Wilkinson. Josh Fraser was there for his first day too, feeling a tiny bit nervous but not showing any indication of it. It could have been any football club, and the group could have been together for months already.
That the group is so young helped some of the newcomers feel less like a fish out of water than they might have. ''It feels like a TAC Cup club, because we're all mostly the same age,'' said Dion Prestia, the No. 9 draftee. ''If I'd gone to a normal club I probably would have felt less experienced than everyone, but it's not like that so much here,'' added Josh Caddy, the No. 7 pick, last man standing when he and Prestia reached the final round of their group's wrestling contest. Caddy goes hell for leather on his first two days, and the others aren't far behind. How good are the new kids? ''A bit too good,'' smiles Daniel Harris, drafted this time last year as a mature age rookie after being delisted by North Melbourne. Watching him encourage the young boys through a tough, two-hour running session on day two, it's obvious how much the midfielder, who thought his career was over, is giving back.
The club is extremely conscious that it has a handful of experienced, well-trained, well-conditioned players to train through to the end of March, and a pile of kids who have nowhere near those miles in their legs. The conditioning bosses - Dean Robinson, who moved up from Geelong two months ago, and Andrew Weller, who worked with the TAC and VFL teams - have essentially split the group into two, for now and for however long it needs to be that way. One is for the new, still growing kids that McKenna wants to see concentrate solely on increasing their durability - rather than lunge for a slightly short Ablett pass during training, stretch too far, get injured, feel bad and set their own progress back. They'll come into the second group - the AFL group - when they're ready.
''What we're trying to do is devise a program that, one, works for our senior guys and doesn't de-train them, but two, develops our young guys and accelerates their physical development so that they can reach the level of the senior guys in as short an amount of time as possible, but in a way that's not detrimental to them. Some of them are still growing, and there are things your body just can't do, physiologically, until you're 21, 22 or even 24,'' Robinson said.
''What we're basically doing for them is shortening a lot of the football stuff - still getting the touch and the basic skills in, but getting their bodies used to handling the volume of work they'll have to do, and slowly ramping the intensity up. But we're not rushing. We're monitoring them, we have to be very careful that we don't create injuries, and we've got time. Over the next three or four years, we've got to slowly build them up, but protect them along the way.''
McKenna has one word he wants each of them to remember throughout the next four months: honesty. ''What's going to be a successful year next year? We don't know that,'' he tells them in Monday's brief meeting. ''We're one of 17 sides next year. We have a 1 in 17 chance of winning the flag. Is that a realistic chance? Why wouldn't we be? How well we go depends on what we do now. Don't waste a single day of training. You won't get this day back again.''
The Gold Coast is getting bigger. In April, McKenna had two assistant coaches, Ken Hinkley and Shaun Hart. Now, Dean Solomon, Shane O'Bree and Andy Lovell have joined in. When Travis Auld was appointed chief executive last June he had six full-time staff. By January that will be up to 56; for a while, he felt like he was introducing one or two new people to every single Monday morning staff meeting. He is about to name a joint co-sponsor and will sign off on a naming rights deal for the new stadium before Christmas. The club opened membership sales two weeks ago, and sold 2501 in the opening week. The aim is 15,000.
The stadium is starting to loom now over the club's portable home along the Nerang River, and two workmen have just begun building an altitude room for the players. Their new training oval should be ready when they get back from their Christmas break. When the AFL fixture was released last month, Auld took a moment to take in how ''Gold Coast'' looked alongside Carlton, Collingwood and all the rest. Last Saturday night, the players, staff, their host families and the coaches celebrated No. 1 draft pick David Swallow's 18th birthday with a party at McKenna's place, and it sunk in again: we really are an AFL club.
''When you build a football club you talk about strategies and operating plans and directions, but it's moments like Saturday night where you can see things come together, when you get a sense of the dynamic that's building. And the dynamic is so much more important than the mechanics,'' Auld said. ''We're a footy club now. The honeymoon's over. We're figuring out what the community wants us to be, and we're adapting to that as we go.''
So far, though, it's all been good news. A new jumper. A new stadium. Lots of players; lots of very good players. Now, it starts getting cut-throat. Only 10 members of the Gold Coast's TAC Cup side are still with the club and another 20 were delisted at the end of last season. When Joey Daye, a member of the under-18 side, was told he'd made the cut, he was halfway through his drive home before he realised how relieved he was to get, after two years' work, to the starting line. The AFL year is still four months away, yet at the end of it the club's envied, extended list will shrink by six spots, which means that, with more draftees coming in, at least eight players will be leaving. Another seven or more will follow come the end of 2012. It means they'll be making some tough decisions. But they're ones they are already pondering.
On another whiteboard, McKenna has stuck up 15 magnets - players who are out of contract come the end of this season. The dream hasn't yet started, yet he already has those players - from Harris, to Daye, to captain of the last two years Mark Lock - trying to make sure it continues beyond the coming season. ''We've already sat those boys down, because I didn't think it was right for them to walk in come round two, round eight, round 15 and say: 'Bluey, what do I need to work on?'' he said. ''Let's talk now. Let's tell them now so that every day they can improve those areas of their game. It sounds tough, but that's what we're in for now. It's fun and it's exciting and we all can't wait for round two, but the fireworks are gone now. Now's when it all starts to get serious.''
Last Modified on 27/11/2010 13:14