Whilst you might only be able to draft players one calendar year at a time, the process commences years in advance. Some recruits are monitored for two, three or even five years, particularly if they aren’t taken until they’re mature-aged like Adam Saad.
So with this in mind, some current Gold Coast SUNS selected in last year’s national and rookie drafts were observed in close to 30 games before SUNS recruiting manager, Dom Ambrogio, read their name out. And that’s just live analysis, not taking into account the amount of hours dedicated to sifting through vision during the working week.
“The thing is you’re not just seeing them over one year, you’re seeing them over the course of a few years,” Ambrogio told goldcoastfc.com.au in the lead up to this month’s draft.
“So we would have seen [Touk] Miller probably 15 times before last year and then, by the time you take into account Vic Metro trials, probably 12 times last year. And don’t forget there’s live and then there’s vision.
“There’s a lot of players, even a few in this year’s draft who we have been following for years, more than three years.
“Sometimes we go, ‘No, he’s not ready yet, but he’s got something’. And then we monitor them going forward and have another look down the track to see where they have progressed to. It can be even longer than three years, sometimes even more than five years.”
In the case of 2015 rookie revelation Saad, Ambrogio and his team closely followed his progress through the TAC Cup system and then monitored his development with VFL outfit Coburg.
Prior to drafting the polished rebounding defender in last December’s rookie draft, Gold Coast went to a handful of his games live in 2014, as well as trawling through every game from that year on tape.
Ambrogio even went a level further, watching Saad play in a hybrid International Rules warm-up game against Ireland. For him, it was simply a matter of being thorough, of dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s.
“We watched ‘Saady’ for a couple of years at Calder and knew a lot about him. Then we watched him probably very scantly in the year where he played development league and was sort of in and out of the seniors,” Ambrogio said.
“And then the year when we picked him, we probably saw him play live five times and then went back through and did a lot of vision stuff. We basically went through every VFL game to pull out all his other stuff.
“We even went and watched him play in the International Rules warm up games against the Irish.”
A season doesn’t make a career, regardless of how impressive it was. But already, the decision to select Saad appears to be a recruiting masterstroke. Although it wasn’t a decision made on a whim, rather it was one built on the back of years of examination and analysis. And that is the game of recruiting.
The Art of Recruiting: How many times?
Gold Coast SUNS recruiting manager Dom Ambrogio revealed that his team monitors potential recruits for years before selecting them, sometimes watching them play 30 or more times.
