Trent McKenzie

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lionshine

lionshine

Brownlow Medallist
Veteran 10k Posts
Jan 9, 2009
15,066
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Queensland
AFL Club
Brisbane Lions
THE GOLD Coast Football Club’s list has taken further shape with the announcement of two more signings ahead of the new franchise’s entry to the AFL competition in 2011.

A week after signing Karmichael Hunt from rugby league, the club has turned its attention to 17-year-olds by adding two young Victorians to its 2010 squad.
TAC Cup players Matt Shaw (Dandenong Stingrays) and Western Jets midfielder Trent McKenzie have both joined the Gold Coast under the AFL’s rule permitting the club to sign 12 players born between January and April 1992.
The two latest recruits bring the number of Gold Coast-bound 17-year-olds to four, with the club able to swoop on another eight by the end of the season.
Tasmanian recruits Maverick Weller and Luke Russell joined the club late last month as part of the Gold Coast’s pre-draft rights on 17-year olds.
Shaw and McKenzie will join the current GCFC squad in the elite development program at Carrara’s Gold Coast Stadium in November.
Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna said Shaw possessed sure ball-handling skills and the agility and endurance to play forward, back or in the midfield.
“He has a penetrating kick, shows courage overhead and the much needed decision making skills to be a top AFL prospect,” he said.
McKenzie, a graduate of the AFL AIS program, has impressed across half back or on the ball for the Jets this season.
“He has a huge left foot kick, a high leap and raw pace and is a talented AFL prospect who will continue to grow over time,” McKenna said.
“He is the quickest player over 20m to come through the AIS program this year (2.84 seconds).
“They are both impressive young men who have an appetite for the hard work required to give them every opportunity to play AFL football in 2011.”

Currently signed until:
2015.
 
18_TrentMcKenzie.jpg



DETAILS
JUMPER # 18
DOB 03/04/1992
HEIGHT 191cm
WEIGHT 82kg
FORMER CLUB Western Jets, VIC

http://www.goldcoastfc.com.au/the-team/player-profiles/trent-mckenzie/



When GC SUNS followers are trawling their memories for 2010 VFL on-field highlights, you can bet wingman Trent McKenzie’s thumping left boot rates repeat mentions.

Plenty of times last season McKenzie - who hails from Williamstown in Melbourne’s inner west - found himself well outside fifty and in space. While most players would be spotting up a target or looking sideways for the attacking cavalry to arrive, McKenzie has simply wound up and let fly. More often than not he’s hit them flush. Better still, most went straight.

McKenzie was a key member of the talented 2009 Western Jets TAC Cup side and toured South Africa with the under 17 AIS/AFL Academy squad in the same year.

A powerfully built and immovably strong on-field presence, McKenzie is also extremely quick, a point underlined by his admirable second to St Kilda’s Rhys Stanley in the 2009 Grand Final sprint.
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Where is the love for this guy? Looks like a future star! that left boot is massive
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

SandyToes said:
I think we all focussed on Smith Swallow Matera as our elite youg'uns at the start of the season, but I think he is going to be a gun.
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thats my point, he has showed a lot and commentators are saying Pendal esp talents which to me sounds darn good. Scary if he is going to be say the 5-7th best Mid in your team with those skills
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

"surely not gunna have a shot from there...ooohhhh that's why he's having a shot from there"

Lucas-esque boot. Bit to work with on half-forward with Matera & Patrick.
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

I don't think he's kicked a goal from inside 50m yet. Against the Crows, he kicked it from the centre square!
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

Fat Pizza said:
I don't think he's kicked a goal from inside 50m yet. Against the Crows, he kicked it from the centre square!
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Still hasn't I don't think - another 2 from outside 50 today
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

Holy crap.

With this kid in your side, you don't even need to bother getting ANY inside 50s, let alone getting quality ones.
 

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Re: Trent Mackenzie

The only goal I remember him kicking from inside 50 was his first, against Port Adelaide. Right on the boundary. Made it look effortless.

He did have a set shot from a 50 that Chapman gave him in the Geelong game. Was about 40 out. Hit the post.

Seems to be way more accurate from 50+ out it seems. Haha!
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

He changes his kicking action when he is inside 50, and doesn't tend to swing out on his left. Obviously isn't as natural as his swinging "cannon" from around 60m. :p
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

http://www.afl.com.au/news/newsarticle/tabid/208/newsid/118849/default.aspx

McKenzie's kicking has been widely praised throughout the football community, and some experts have already dubbed him the best kick in the game.

The 19-year-old is well aware his disposal by foot is his most valuable asset, but he's determined to further round out his game.

"I suppose it has come naturally. It has been one of my strengths in my junior career. I had to work on it as well, a lot of practice goes into my kicking," McKenzie said.

"I'm still working on my aerobic capacity, just running out games. I'm improving my fitness every week."

McKenzie earned the NAB AFL Rising Star nomination for round 17 for his efforts in the Suns' win over Richmond last Saturday.

He had 21 disposals in the victory to be the fourth Gold Coast player to be nominated after Brandon Matera (round five), Smith (round seven) and Swallow (round 14).
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Well Done super boot:thumbsu:
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

It's odd that he got the nomination this week, as he wasn't super. Wasn't bad either, but was definitely not a stand out. 21 disposals, 8 marks and a couple of goal assists certainly aren't bad stats though. If those stats represent a down game, then you should probably get a nomination. :D

Happy he finally got it though!
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

Sunny1010 said:
It's odd that he got the nomination this week, as he wasn't super. Wasn't bad either, but was definitely not a stand out. 21 disposals, 8 marks and a couple of goal assists certainly aren't bad stats though. If those stats represent a down game, then you should probably get a nomination. :D

Happy he finally got it though!
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I think it was a 'oh we should have done it last week'
 
Re: Trent Mackenzie

I just discovered this article about Trent. It has some great stories about his junior footy
http://www.smh.com.au/afl/afl-news/football-world-at-his-feet-20110729-1i4h5.html

Football world at his feet
Peter Hanlon
July 30, 2011

The kid with the 'cannon' kick
After only 15 games of AFL footy, Gold Coast Suns midfielder Trent McKenzie is setting tongues wagging with his amazing left boot.

BECAUSE everyone who has witnessed Trent McKenzie's football journey has a story about his kicking, it seems only proper to let his mum go first. Already, his left leg has broken lines and broken open defences, but only Karen McTaggart can say it's broken her windows.

Jaws have been dropping since the very first time her shy, reserved little boy unleashed a weapon that is being hailed as the most potent in the game. “He just picked the ball up and kicked it,” she said this week, adding “my goodness!” to sum up a gift evident even before kindergarten.

The Andrew Walkers of the world will always lift bums off seats, but to watch McKenzie kick a football is to experience the purity of the game's most fundamental skill. Some deride the notion that a sporting act can be a thing of beauty; they have our pity. When Gold Coast's No.?18 kicks the ball, a single word suffices: Wow!

“It's like a golfer when he picks up the one wood, or a cricketer who smacks that six,” says his coach, Guy McKenna, confessing to mid-game murmurings of awe from the sidelines. “When it's so sweet, you almost can't even hear it.”

Archie Pateras coached McKenzie at Altona Junior Football Club from under 9s through to under 14s. He doesn't know which story best captures this freakishness of foot, so he just keeps telling them.

Like the night at under-11s training, when he had two rows of kids passing to each other, half a dozen metres apart. Pateras walked along the line and stood opposite McKenzie. Three times in a row the ball thudded into his heart.


Getting his kicks: Trent McKenzie was just a toddler when he revealed his potential. “All right, smart Alec, let's try your opposite foot,” he chided. His heart got a rest, but only by a few centimetres.

Then there was the under-13s game at Spotswood, when McKenzie marked on the 50-metre line as the three-quarter-time siren sounded. The home team headed towards the huddle but their coach, walking onto the ground alongside Pateras, saw the boy striding purposefully back to take his shot at goal.

“He's kidding, isn't he?”

Pateras told him it might be an idea to get someone on the mark, not to mention the goal line. It wouldn't have mattered — McKenzie's kick sailed through, three-quarter-post high.

Perhaps best of all he likes a tale that illustrates what others are quick to say of the 19-year-old, that he's anything but a smart alec, and will always choose what's right for the team over the temptation to showcase his skill.

Pateras remembers one little kid who was overawed by the game's bump and grind, so would station himself well out of harm's way. “I told the group, 'I've asked everyone to stay in their spots, and if that little fella has done that and you spot him, I expect you to kick it to him.'"

Within minutes McKenzie had the ball in defence, looked up, saw this lonely option, and drilled a 40-metre pass. “The kid didn't move, he just stood there,” Pateras recalls. “I thought it was going to hit him in the head and kill him.”

Mercifully, it dipped, hitting its target smack on the chest and rebounding back in the direction it had come from. McKenzie followed up, gave it back to the stunned mite, cajoled him to return the favour, and calmly delivered the next booming kick downfield.

“He was one of the most genuine, decent, level-headed kids I've seen,” says Pateras, whose son Declan and McKenzie were good mates, giving him an insight into his character beyond the football or cricket field. “He was never a big-noter, was always trying to bring the little kid into the game. He was just a natural.”

Missiles tend to make an impression, and murmurings about McKenzie's kicking have been building since he unleashed a running, 70-metre goal from the Southern Cross flank in round six that not even Essendon's 139-point win could erase from the highlights reel. His 15 games have been laden with booming examples, like the goal off three steps from well inside the centre square against Adelaide, but the biggest explosion came against Collingwood last Saturday night.

His second-quarter effort, when he took possession at half-back with only empty space before him, took a bounce through the middle with Brent Macaffer in pursuit, and speared through a bouncing goal from more than 70 metres, ensured Walker's mark and Eddie Betts's goal two states south didn't fill the entire round-18 screen. Arguably, his sweet, running roost a quarter earlier that comfortably cleared goal umpire Chelsea Roffey's head was just as good.

Karen McTaggart was at a ball last Saturday night, so missed seeing her son having one. But she is used to Trent's trick making an indelible mark.

“You'll be sitting in the grandstand and someone will say, 'Oh my God, I've never seen a kid kick the ball like this!'?” she says. “I'll be thinking, 'Well I did'. I'm his mum, I saw it all the time.”

When she tired of Trent and his brothers Kane (older) and Jake (younger) either breaking windows or kicking the ball over the backyard fences, Karen sent them out the front of their Altona Meadows home. It is here that Pateras — who lived nearby and says the McKenzie boys would be playing footy or cricket in the street no matter what time of day you drove by — says his kicking talent was honed.

“If anyone could take credit for his skills, it would have to be his older brother Kane,” he says. His mother says Kane, who enjoyed a credible VFL career with Williamstown (where Karen's brother, Brett, won a Liston Trophy) and now plays with suburban powerhouse Maribyrnong Park, was Trent's idol. He'd do anything his big brother asked.

“Kane used to send him down to the corner, to the main intersection, and tell him to kick it into our front fence,” Karen says of her then primary school-aged boy. “And he used to do it.” The corner is three houses away, Pateras reckons about 45 metres.

Karen says her three boys are a mixed bag — Jake, a Western Jets 17-year-old, “is left-sided at everything except kicking”, 27-year-old Kane is a left-footer who does everything else with his right. Trent swings a bat or golf club left-handed, and writes and throws with his right. All pale next to what he can do with his left leg.

Michael Lewis's 2003 book Moneyball, about an American baseball manager who changed the face of recruiting, was compulsory reading for AFL recruiters. Where Oakland As manager Billy Beane told his scouts to look beyond a player's deficiencies and simply “get me the kid who can hit”, football moves further still into the realm of the kid who can kick.

Yet McKenzie is more than that. McKenna acknowledges that for all the tinkering of his ilk, the modern game comes down to two factors: “Having the ability and clean hands to get hold of the ball, and having the leg to kick it.” He loves McKenzie's natural proficiency in the latter, but knows there is more to his young gun.

“He's second for inside 50s for us, which is fairly easy when you can kick it that far, but he's in our top five as far as rebounds as well,” McKenna says. “Which tells me as a winger or midfielder he's working really hard both ways. That's the sign of an elite player coming together.”

The coach knows Kane McKenzie was “a bit of a hard nut” at Willy, and sees Trent relishing sessions with midfield coach Shane O'Bree focusing on “getting inside”. “He's got that unique power to get away from the stoppages, and if he can get his hands on the ball and get clear, as we've seen, it's a 60-metre-plus gain for us from a stoppage, which is very handy in the modern game.”

In this, another McKenzie attribute comes to the fore — speed. Only weeks after signing on as one of the Suns' dozen priority 17-year-olds, he finished second in the 2009 grand final sprint, a step behind winner Rhys Stanley. As regional manager at the Western Jets, Shane Sexton had seen plenty of him, but was taken aback in the stands that day. Sexton describes his displays of pace this year as “staggering”.

Scott Clayton has always had an eye for a good kick of the football, and says McKenzie is “extraordinary, no doubt about that”. But he also loves how the picture has filled out, “his contested footy, his marking, he's really improved across the board”. He's sure he's grown from the 188 centimetres listed pre-season. And yes, he doubts he has recruited a better kick.

Out in the world of online forums the superlatives flowed. One dubbed him “McCannon”, another called his kicking “animalistic”, a third eulogised the “utter disdain” he has for the Sherrin. Gen Y is abuzz with the fortune he could make by sacking the AFL and jumping straight to the modern Aussie rules retirement plan of punting in the NFL.

McKenna is very happy to have him. The former Eagle has childhood memories of The Winners on television, watching his beloved North Melbourne, but being drawn to the kicking of Swans Mark Browning, and later Mark Bayes. Locally, he loved Claremont's Brad Reynolds “hitting 70-metre drop punts that were like head-high missiles”.

The elite kicker must have variety. McKenna notes that McKenzie's footy brain is strong, too, and he resists the urge to “just pin the ears back and go thump all the time”, balancing the long with the short. “It's about hitting passes over a line of players,” he says. “Where most mortal kickers can't reach, and end up kicking to a contest, these blokes can put it 10 or 15 metres over the top and break up a game.”

And, of course, they can launch goals mere mortals can't, too. Another YouTube posting features McKenzie — whose eight goals, nine behinds from beyond 50 are a competition high — being put to the test at Metricon Stadium from 55, 65 and 70 metres.

That sweet action and effortless mix of power and timing send the first two kicks sailing between the goalposts. Steeling himself for the coup de gras, he offers a wry smile. “I reckon 70's about me distance, mate, but we'll see how we go.”

Needless to say he landed that one, too. What next? The moon?

Some of the other kicking stars
AFL talent manager Kevin Sheehan on standout kicks to emerge from the AFL/AIS Academy.

LUKE HODGE

A brilliant kick. Was regarded as really special, his kicking just stood out — he kicked further than the rest, lower and harder than the rest. He had that 'ping' about him.

MICHAEL HURLEY

Just elite with both feet. Very rarely a kid of that size can kick as well left as he did right, and penetrate. He played a full-back and was a back-to-back All-Australian, and his kicking-in was an absolute pleasure to watch at underage level. Very rare.

HAMISH HARTLETT

Beautifully balanced. His use of the ball — short, long, right, left — was in the elite company.

DANIEL RICH

Again, 'pings' them like McKenzie. Low, hard, penetrating, over the lines. It's like the quarter-back who's able to spot the target and drop it over the top of that pack that's in front of him, onto the bloke running to advantage. Whether it's towards goal or leading up, his depth perception as well as the skill is elite.

BUILDING A KILLER KICK
Trent McKenzie since he first came under the AFL development radar

MAY 2009

McKenzie's kicking was rated five out of five. The scale is as follows:

5 Rare (Consistently kicks with accuracy over short and long distances and under pressure. Outstanding technician with great vision and awareness. Very good on non-preferred side).

4 Excellent (Kicking a real feature of his game, only occasionally makes a kicking error with preferred foot, normally under intense opposition pressure. Very capable on non-preferred side, excellent decision-maker).

3 Good (Strong preferred-foot kick, rarely misses short targets and is sound over distance, normally getting the ball to advantage. May struggle with opposite foot. Generally a good decision-maker).

2 Marginal (Not completely sound with technique so struggles under moderate pressure. Lacks real penetration and precision with his disposal, and at times lacks vision and awareness).

1 Poor (Has flaws in technique and struggles to get the ball to advantage with any consistency. At times lacks vision and awareness).

WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT HIM

Trent had a fair carnival but showed at different times he will develop into an elite footballer as he gets harder on himself and works harder when the ball is in his area, and when it isn't. He's got a great penetrating left foot, he can kick over the lines. - ANDREW JOHNSTON, then Vic Metro under-16 coach, now Gold Coast academy coach, after the 2008 AFL under-16 championships in Sydney.

Excellent, penetrating left-foot kick, pace, evasive skills and football know-how. Reads the game well, good tackler. - SHANE SEXTON, Western Jets regional manager, May 2009.

Trent has a lovely kick in a technical sense, but at this stage a laconic approach means kick effectiveness is not as good as it should be. Attention to detail with his core will be beneficial in this area as well. He tends to lean back too far on kicks. - ALAN McCONNELL, AIS-AFL Academy head coach, September 2009.
 
Had a bit of a knee injury that set him back some time in January. Only did half the pre-season, I think.

Went to Arizona a second time and did most of the work there, although pretty sure he banged up his knee further when he fell over during that basketball half-time show. Set him back a further few weeks.

Just heard this from Mike Whiting.

Michael Whiting
The Cannon looking good at Suns training this morning. A few wks away from playing seniors but was good to see #gcsuns

Sooner we get him back the better. He adds some real dash and unpredictability.
 
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