Tiger cubs receive guidance
Matthew Trollope | 3/07/2007 5:35:16 PM | Sportal
Lyall Johnson | July 4, 2007 | The Age
The club has embarked on an initiative to invite past players to bring their children to Punt Road to participate in football clinics.
Called the Young Guns program, it will make the club a more close-knit family and give staff the chance to scout talent, according to senior coach Terry Wallace.
As a general philosophy, the clinics are a way of giving former players another link with the club, but more specifically, they will target the children of 100-game players who would be eligible as a father-son selection.
In developing the concept, Wallace said he used examples from overseas where clubs still had traditional links with geographical locations and adapted it to the father-son system, which is the only way under draft system that clubs could identify and nurture talent for their own purposes.
"Once upon a time … you could actually go into your own local area and work with the kids …" he said.
"The one area we do have that is the capability of being able to work with our father-son players. The more work we put into them, the more likelihood is we are going to get something out of it in future years."
The club put on a clinic for the children yesterday. .
The session included a club history lesson for participants, skills sessions with assistant coaches, and strength, conditioning and fitness tests.
Senior players will act as mentors for the boys, further strengthening the bond between the club’s present and future.
“[The boys] get the email address of their senior player so if they want any information on their football [such as] anything that they need to work on and improve, they’ve got an ongoing connection with one of the senior players,” Wallace said.
Those who took part in the program included Nick Wood and Kyle Weightman, sons of premiership players Brian and Dale.
“I think it’s a great program that the football club has started up and it really hones in on helping the boys with their skills, and also lets them know about the other things that it takes to play AFL, dietary information and the programs you have to go through,” Nick Wood said.
On playing for Richmond, he said: “It would just be a great honour and a privilege to pull on the black and yellow jumper and I’d just love to play for them, it’s a lifelong dream [of mine] to play AFL [football].”
Wallace hopes the program will grow throughout the year and increase on the 35 boys who took part in the first session. The program is not restricted to boys eligible under the AFL father-son rule whose father must have played 100 games or more for the club - but to the sons of any former Tiger who show some potential.
“It was our first opportunity to see some of the older boys and straight away our recruiting staff and our assistant coaches have identified two or three guys who they seriously reckon can play and that [we] should be keeping a real eye on from now on, so it’ll be an ongoing program.”
http://realfooty.com.au/news/news/tigers-seek-defender-amongst-cubs/2007/07/03/1183351210540.htmlhttp://sportal.com.au/default.aspx/afl-news-display/tiger-cubs-receive-guidance-30207
