Toast Recruiting and player development

[RunningBounce]

In my humble opinion, this premiership is a celebration of the club's recruiting and player development. I count 46 players on the list, and only 7 didn’t play this season. That’s 39 players who contributed to a premiership.

Included in those 39 are:

• 7 on the rookie list this season (Baker, Chol, Eggy, Pickett, Stack, Townsend and Weller)
• 5 off the rookie list from other seasons (Castagna, Lambert, Moore, Short and Soldo)
• Grimes from the Pre-season Draft
• 6 third round or higher draftees – (Astbury, Butler, Broad, Garthy, Graham, Markov)
• 8 second round draftees - (Balta, Bolton, Naish, CCJ, Edwards, KMac, Menadue, Ross)
• 7 first round picks - (Cotch, Ellis, Higgins, Rance, Riewoldt, Rioli, Vlas)
• 5 traded in from other clubs (Caddy, Houli, Lynch, Nank, Prestia)

Great effort to turn mostly low-value picks into this deep premiership list. Full credit to the club recruiters for finding the talent, but equally, full credit to the development coaches for teaching these sometimes flawed players how to get the most out of themselves.

What’s working? What do we need to do to keep a strong list?