In the lead up to this year's national draft, goldcoastfc.com.au spent time with the Gold Coast SUNS' recruiting team, receiving a rare insight into the mysterious world of AFL recruiting.
Have you ever wondered how many games a recruiting team covers each weekend in winter?
The Gold Coast SUNS recruiting team watch up to 35 games every weekend during the season – and that’s including trial matches, which can begin in late January. It’s a massive consumption of football, although it’s simply a reality of the job.
The SUNS recruiting team is headed by Dom Ambrogio and list manager Scott Clayton who oversees the whole operation. Inside their team are nine others comprised of full-timers and part-timers. There is a data analysis specialist who looks over endless reams of statistics, analyzing all the numbers.
On any given weekend, Gold Coast recruiters typically digest five or six games live each, and sometimes up to seven if they fit a Friday afternoon game into their schedules.
They zip in and out of airports, jet-setting all over the country, but don’t be fooled into thinking it is a glamorous life. They sit – typically in foldable camping chairs - in any weather, trying to discover the future of their football club.
“We’d certainly have probably games Friday, Saturday, Sunday. There’s some school games, Friday night games depending on where you’re travelling to,” Ambrogio explained to goldcoastfc.com.au.
“Saturday and Sunday you’d normally get in two to three games both days – sometimes it might be half of a game.
“But you would probably average five games over a weekend and sometimes six.
“If you go to Adelaide for instance, you’ll go there for a Friday night game – there will be the reserves at 4:50 and the seniors at 7:40. The next morning you’ll get colts, reserves, seniors and then you’ll get the next day if you fly back and get a double header in Victoria.
“So on weekends like that you’ll see seven games. Everyone would be doing that amount of games live and nearly every weekend somebody will be flying off somewhere.”
Hardly much time for leisure on weekends. But if you are football obsessed, it’s clearly far from a chore and something Ambrogio has been doing alongside the Gold Coast list manager for a long, long time.
