Team GWS prepares to cast its net

TEAM GWS high performance manager Alan McConnell says he will cast his net far and wide in search of prospective AFL footballers from the new franchise’s catchment area.

Cultural and sporting background will be of no consequence when it comes to identifying the best young sportsmen to represent the League’s proposed 18th club as it builds to a 2012 debut.

With the new club granted zoned access to all areas of NSW and the ACT outside the existing scholarship system from 2010, it’s just as well.

Rugby league and soccer are the dominant junior sports in Team GWS’s multicultural heartland of western Sydney but McConnell said he wasn’t fazed by the prospect of recruiting talent from new territories.

“Talent is what we’re interested in, and it’s not race or socially specific, nor is it sports-code specific,” he said.

“If you look at the talent pool from the AIS over the last five years, traditionally about two-thirds of those boys were national-level athletes in another sport.

“The notion that it’s one football code versus another one is crazy. It’s very restricting, in fact.

“We’re here to put together the best possible list we can and we don’t really have a specific brief as to whether or not we’re targeting a particular area of the market. I think the second we do that, we’re restricting ourselves.”

The former head of the AIS/AFL high performance program said he had made Team GWS his priority even before his appointment was officially announced.

“I knew the appointment was imminent in late May and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take my eye off this year’s draft - which is very much the brief with the AIS role - and look elsewhere,” McConnell said.

“The last three months has been very much about looking at the talent pool from 13, 14 all the way up to our first draft which will be the 17-year-olds going into the 2011 draft pool.”

The new club will be granted significant concessions upon its expected entry to the League in 2012 and it is expected that some of those draft selections will be traded for experienced players to bolster a young list.

But McConnell said he would recruit his players with the expectation that they would form part of Team GWS’s inaugural AFL list.

“We’ve got significant access to uncontracted players and we’ve also got, through the four 17-year-olds [born in 1994], ability to trade for experienced talent off AFL lists,” he said.

“My intention would be to try to recruit and develop what we bring to the club to keep it. I certainly wouldn’t be in the marketplace to be using young boys as trade bait.

“Certainly, it would be my intention that as the club builds, what we bring into the fold, we bring in with a view to it becoming part of our own.”