All or most of the Directors, plus Steve Wright and Trent Jacobs attended the meeting. Around 40 members turned out for the meeting, which is a bit different to the previous two meetings I’d been to, where it was standing room only. One lady rightly pointed out that it should be a bit of a compliment that there were so few in attendance, because had things been not going so well the room would have been packed.
Steve Wright spoke first about the finances and mentioned that sponsorship and memberships were up. We have an 81% retention rate of members. However, we are looking at ways to sign up new members.
For the remainder of this season, the Club has budgeted for attendance figures similar to those of last year.
Things are pretty positive and there has been a major turn around in most areas of the Club.
Greg Miller then spoke about the footy department. There were significant cut backs in spending in the footy department, which particularly affected the recruiting department. However, we still have a pretty good network set up to give us feedback on talent in other states. Since the cut backs, GM also does a lot more of the scouting himself. Through the AFL (??), there is a lot more electronic data available (i.e. video and other stats and records) on young players around the country.
As seems to happen most years, he also said that this year’s draft, at this stage, was not going to be that deep.
At the end of this year, we are unlikely to be in a position where we can expect to pick up another 6-7 young players in the draft. To draft a young player costs in the order of $150,000 for around 2 years. Unless you are confident the player has a high chance of making it at the level, it is a huge risk to take a young player late in the draft.
Unlikely we can go after another Nathan Brown/Kane Johnson type this year, as we don’t have the room to do so. Once some of our senior players’ contracts are re-negotiated and we can free up some room then we can get back into those types of trades. Keeping in mind that we don’t really want to be giving away any early draft pick(s).
