Eels Blogs

When you try to build a tower, the most important thing to get right is the foundations. Attempt to build your tower too high, without a stable footing, and you’re assured that eventually the whole thing is going to come toppling over.

If at Parramatta, the tower we are trying to build is a premiership, then the foundation has to be a strong and successful junior development program. A steady stream of promising young players who are able to fill out a squad and step into vacancies as they emerge, is without doubt the key to sustainable success. It’s a blight on the Eels that a club like Melbourne with no junior catchment area of note, has been more successful at this than Parramatta, who arguably - along with Penrith - have the best nursery in the game.

The reality is that since Brian Smith left the club our junior programs have been largely mismanaged. It was one of the things that Smith made a priority of getting right but we haven’t gotten it right for a long time. You only have to look to the fact that we’ve not been able to produce and retain an NRL quality half for more than a decade as evidence of that reality.

The Junior Academy

One of the things that I’ve been hearing since Stephen Kearney and his team arrived at the club, is that once again the junior development has been made a priority and the setting up of the junior academy has been central to that. However, there hasn’t been a lot written or talked about what progress we’ve been making in this regard. This week, I got the chance to sit down with recruitment manager Peter Nolan and together with bits and pieces I’ve picked up talking to people like junior coaches, I thought it was time to look at what we’ve been doing in this regard.

Firstly, Peter Nolan is a very impressive individual. He was Wayne Bennett’s development manager at the Broncos and the rash of top young players that are just exploding onto the scene in Brisbane now all came through the academy that Nolan put in place there. Like Bennett, he originally hails from Warwick, and like Bennett, he strikes you as a no bullshit individual, who has an appealing genuineness about him. However, the big thing that I came away from our discussion appreciating, is that finally we seem to be working towards a bigger picture plan and vision.

Centralised

Make no mistake our recruitment has been centralised around Kearney and Nolan. Nolan is involved in every recruitment decision, whether it be signing an NRL player or a 16 year old.

This is a fundamental change from how recruitment was done previously where a half dozen or so people were involved at the various levels of the club.

Clearly, that puts a lot of responsibility upon Nolan. But it also means that every signing we’re making is being made with that bigger picture in mind. Nolan should know where every hole in the club’s recruitment process is, and has the authority to address it.

Principles behind the Academy

It’s probably fair to say that in the past, it’s not until a player reached Under 20 level that they really became part of the season. Yes, we had our junior development squads but they operated pretty independently from the operations above them.

The new Parramatta system is about getting to the elite players before that level, so that they can ingrain in them into the Eels way of doing things, long before they are a potential NRL player.

One very distinct difference about the Academy compared to say the junior development camps and the like we’ve run in the past, is there is a very firm focus on putting physical development first. Training camps in the past, were very much skills based around a skills focus. When you bring in a player for a short period of time, that’s pretty much all you can do.

However, because the academy is an ongoing program, there is the opportunity to start very early getting the kids into the right physical shape. That is based on a couple of issues - they are going to be ready for senior football a lot earlier if they’ve been training their bodies for the day that time comes from very early in their development. However, more importantly, is is based on the belief that you cannot complete the skills training that are required of you in training if you don’t have the physical ability to do it. That is you can’t ask a kid to accelerate sharply to the line and as they approach the defender, to sharply decelerate and offer a soft pass to a support, if they don’t have the strength in their core to perform that skill.

The other thing the ongoing program of the academy does is it lets the club both assess and work on, the players mental development. You can probably get a kid’s body in shape in a couple of years of hard training, but reversing a bad attitude is a whole lot harder.

Development first, results second

Parramatta has a long, proud history of winning junior competitions. We’ve always put quite a lot of emphasis on competitions like the Club Championship and the SG Ball and Harold Matthews competition.

The new Parramatta philosophy is that results in those competitions will be secondary to player development. The primary objective is to develop players so that we are producing a stream of NRL-capable players.

You’ll see fewer players picked just because they might be early developers, and while they’re huge and dominant 16 year olds they soon lose that physical dominance when others kids catch up to them in terms of development.

Nolan’s mantra is that every decision should be judged firstly on whether it’s in the best interests of the club, then on whether it’s good for the player and only in the end, hopefully it’s to the benefit of the individual making that decision. So while a string of junior competition trophies may look good on a coach’s resume, that hasn’t necessarily benefited the club long-term towards achieving its primary objective, which is to win NRL competitions/

Pushing kids faster and earlier

Right now, there are a fair squad of SG Ball players training with the NYC. Similarly, there are a bunch of NYC players training with the NRL squad. If those player indicate in that pre-season training that they’re capable of playing at that higher age division, they’ll be pushed to do so. The club made moves in that direction last year when Jacob Gagan and Vai Tautai skipped a full-year of SG Ball and went straight up to NYC. Tautai went close to playing NRL.

You’ll see our best NYC players, playing more State League. We’re likely to start well in NYC this year, but give a month or two and you’re likely to see players like Matthew Eisenhuth and Jason Seage get early promotions into the senior grades.

Why all this is the right direction

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that has been a long-time 1Eyed Eel reader that I’m incredibly positive about all of these initiatives, I’ve written many blogs on these subjects before.

Not too long ago, I had a pretty spirited discussion with someone on these issues. They’re argument was that the most important thing for a club is to have a winning culture - you need to win in the junior grades so kids come through with a winning mentality that they take through with them into the seniors.

Well, I’d argue that’s hardly been the case for Parramatta. We continue to do well in SG Ball competitions and Harold Matthews, but our record even at NYC level is abysmal. Basically, our best young players have it to easy in those important formative years. They’re head and shoulders above the other kids that they’re playing against, and they learn that they don’t have to work hard to win and succeed. They get into a mindset that they’re able to take short cuts and get away with it because they’re special.

When they get to NYC level and if they’re good enough NRL level, suddenly they’re not so special. There’s a whole bunch of other kids who are just as big, just as skillful except most of those blokes work a lot harder. Kids who have come out of the bush and have had to battle to get the attention of NRL clubs are going to have a lot more fight in them, than that talented Parramatta kid who’s been coasting through elite junior development squads. I believe this is the foundation of that soft underbelly that Parramatta has undoubtedly developed over the years.

There’s that word again - foundation. You guys see enough of the NRL side to make up your own minds about what’s happening there, but what I can tell you is that I truly believes that at our foundations we’re in the best shape we have been for a long time and you probably won’t see the real fruits of the work that is being done right now for another five or six years. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, and it gives me a great deal of optimism to know that the people in the right places share that belief.

With that monster post, I declare my off-season hiatus to be over. Let's bring on 2012.