Are Jonas or Cassisi representative of our past captains?

[tribey]

I’m sorry but this is just absolute loser garbage and this sort of attitude is exactly why we haven’t been successful under David Koch.

We didn’t win because we were a big fish, we were a big fish because we won premierships. And we won premierships because we made it our singular focus no matter the cost. Everyone at the club was expected to be the best at their role and adhere to the Creed and if you didn’t, you were moved on quickly. We had the most supporters in the SANFL because we won all the time, despite sharing a very crowded Western suburbs catchment area.

This is absolutely not a dig at Jonas because every player is a product of their environment to some degree, even culturally transformative leaders like Luke Hodge or Fos Williams. Would the likes of Tim Ginever or Greg Phillips have been such great leaders if they played for South Adelaide and were brought up under that culture? Probably, but it’s hard to say because they were immersed in that culture from the very beginning of their careers. The culture comes from the top down.

We don’t have to “wait our turn”, we can win flags in every decade like Hawthorn if we adopt the right behaviours. Further, assuming that if we wait our time will come is a furphy, it might not come. St Kilda have 1 flag in 126 years of V/AFL footy. I don’t need to tell you the behaviours we need to adopt, because the greatest leader in the history of our club wrote a Creed that spells it out better than anyone before or since. We have to live and breathe winning, we have to remove people from our club for whom winning premierships isn’t priority 1, 2 and 3. This is especially true in leadership positions, from the Chairman and CEO down.

If you believe you’re a little club who is a small fish swimming with sharks, you’ll give yourself that excuse year in year out and you’ll never win anything.

Further, the idea that we need to ignore our history to grow our supporter base is a complete misunderstanding of sports marketing and how it works. We of all clubs know that better than anyone. We almost died as a club when ignoring our history and we’ve dramatically increased in engagement when embracing it.

We can’t grow our supporter base meaningfully through marketing or branding. Only 2 things will grow our supporter base, population increase in our catchment area, and winning. Winning is everything. Marketing isn’t to attract new supporters, it’s to make the existing supporter base feel engaged enough to attend games and put money into the club. Abandoning a club’s heritage has never engaged a supporter base in the history of sport.

Bingo.

It staggers me that with a significant chunk of our contemporary supporter base: to be negative is a sin, but to be defeatist is a virtue.

 

[Schulzenfest]

Bingo.

It staggers me that with a significant chunk of our contemporary supporter base: to be negative is a sin, but to be defeatist is a virtue.

Right?

The position of most of this board is "we'd only need to replace one man to have a squad a capable of winning a premiership". The position of most of the Hinkley defenders is "it's not Ken's fault, we've just never been good enough to win a premiership". How are we the negative ones?