bulldogproud wrote:knowledge wrote:bulldogproud wrote:Ronnie wrote:What Sturt do do well is develop their own and produce league players out of their system because recruiting has been very low key for a few years now. Challenge is will this approach be good enough to go against the likes of Eagles and Glenelg who supplement their lists with quality recruits year after year. Apart from Tom Lewis who I think skipped Reserves football most of them (Illman, Coomblas, Grivell, Voss etc) spent at least a year or two playing reserves football. It must be a reasonable environment as well to keep them there as even Penfold, a fringe player is still running around for Sturt and I remember him playing reserves footy back in 2014!
Would I be correct in stating that a number of Sturt's players have had the fortune of coming up through St. Peter's College or PAC though? They have excellent school programs that sure help.
On the contrary, we have to reeducate them when they come back from independent school programs into playing their roles instead of running around like unregistered dogs trying to get every kick they can. I don't know what they try to each them at school footy, but, it's certainly not structure...
I would be extremely surprised if that was the case nowadays, particularly when you look at who heads up the football program at the independent schools:
St. Peter's - Josh Francou
PAC - Matthew Slade
Rostrevor - James Allan
Scotch - Ben Nelson
Immanuel - Mark Bickley
Westminster - Tim Weatherald
Sacred Heart - Jon Symonds
Are you truly saying that these veterans of the SANFL system allow their players to 'run around like unregistered dogs' and have no idea how to prepare them for the SANFL???
Beat me to it BP. St Michaels was Andrew McCleod a few years ago, not sure who it is now. Saint ingatius - Panos, Pembroke ?. Its a ridiculous assertion.
Must be a real hassle communicating with the likes of Josh Francou and Matty Slade when dealing with the Private Schools, not to mention the integration of training that they organise with their respective league clubs starting in year 7. The colleges have elite development programs, gyms, pools and physical/mental development as well as scholarships designed to lure the best footballers to meet inclusivity and deliver footy results. No complaint with the latter from me, but saying that the schools are somehow detracting from elite player development is delusional, particularly on a thread that has skewed to discussing Centrals metro zone.
Metropolitan wise, the brightest Centrals have is Golden Grove and the metro campuses of Trinity, but the challenge is that soccer is really well organised and always attracted the migrants and their offspring within the region.