Rebuild at what cost?

[47MVEagle]

I'd rather lose with an unknown group of local juniors and let them develop over a few years with a decent coach.
In the 90s Bozo rushed through Elsegood, Danny Moore, Kosef, Gartner , Beaver, Hoppa, Chris Ryan,etc who were largely unknown. Des rushed through , Choc, Stewart Bros, Paul Stephenson, Matai, Jason King, Wolfman, etc. What happened to those days...where we co
We've only managed to push through the Turbo brothers, since they were an obvious shoe in to make the NRL due to their enormous talent. We dont seem to develop diamonds in the rough anymore. We buy too many players past their peak or too old and not much in youth.

The western pathways program resulted in a batch (11 or 12 players) of supposedly gun young players (all managed by Tartak) signed by the club.

Those players included the Fainus x 4, Schuster, Titmuss (RIP), Saab, Olakau’atu, Suli, etc.

Those players were then used as leverage by Tartak to constantly upgrade & extend each of them.

That was about 5 years of our recent history that resulted in only 2 players of that batch (Saab & Olakau’atu) remaining at the club.

We were well & truly dudded by the Fulton-Tartak scheme & only last year cut ties with the western pathways program & refocused on developing local juniors again.

The club is still recovering from it, hence no local juniors coming through (yet) & having to recruit older players on short contracts to fill out our forwards roster.

 

[TheSoaringEagle2023]

The western pathways program resulted in a batch (11 or 12 players) of supposedly gun young players (all managed by Tartak) signed by the club.

Those players included the Fainus x 4, Schuster, Titmuss (RIP), Saab, Olakau’atu, Suli, etc.

Those players were then used as leverage by Tartak to constantly upgrade & extend each of them.

That was about 5 years of our recent history that resulted in only 2 players of that batch (Saab & Olakau’atu) remaining at the club.

We were well & truly dudded by the Fulton-Tartak scheme & only last year cut ties with the western pathways program & refocused on developing local juniors again.

The club is still recovering from it, hence no local juniors coming through (yet) & having to recruit older players on short contracts to fill out our forwards roster.

Ola was spotted by tagging along Fainu at training, I dont think that really counts though does it?

 

[TheSoaringEagle2023]

The western pathways program resulted in a batch (11 or 12 players) of supposedly gun young players (all managed by Tartak) signed by the club.

Those players included the Fainus x 4, Schuster, Titmuss (RIP), Saab, Olakau’atu, Suli, etc.

Those players were then used as leverage by Tartak to constantly upgrade & extend each of them.

That was about 5 years of our recent history that resulted in only 2 players of that batch (Saab & Olakau’atu) remaining at the club.

We were well & truly dudded by the Fulton-Tartak scheme & only last year cut ties with the western pathways program & refocused on developing local juniors again.

The club is still recovering from it, hence no local juniors coming through (yet) & having to recruit older players on short contracts to fill out our forwards roster.

Back in the past, we used to only recruit players from other clubs that were at least consistently performing at an ok level. For example Neil Tierney, Michael Robertson, Luke Willo, Shayne Dunley, Le'strange were ok but they werent washed as NRL players at the time we bought them. There was a period where we did buy players where maybe other clubs may not have wanted, but at least we brought some juniors through to balance the roster. (ie Michael Witt, Andrew Walker)
Heck we even brought in Mitch Creary who was on match payments but he did ok for a guy that had a full time job. At the same time Im not questioning the effort from the older guys now ie Nathan Brown, TKO, Brooks who genuinely give it a crack. But the imbalance of the overeliance on these guys taking priority over youth development is massively concerning.