By Michael Whiting 
 

Gold Coast SUNS coach Guy McKenna said it was more than the club’s two wins that had him smiling one-third of the way through its first AFL season.

The GC SUNS are 2-5 ahead of a bye this weekend and surprised many with victories over Port Adelaide and Brisbane Lions, which has them sitting above both sides as well as last season’s grand finalists St Kilda.

While McKenna welcomed the pair of victories, he said it was the individual development of players that had impressed him most from his young outfit.

“I don’t want to think the two wins is the reason we’re saying they’ve passed. I think it’s looking at the boys and seeing that they’ve grown as an individual and then as a group,” he said.

“I think there’s longer parts of the game we’ve been able to play good passages of football, and Gold Coast passages of football, and I think for us (the improvement) from round one to round nine has been pleasing.

“Internally we have about 30 KPIs that we’re tracking throughout the course of the year, and the simple one for us is the two times we’ve won contested footy we’ve won the game. Every time we’ve lost it, we’ve lost the game.

“The thing it (winning) does to the group is it shows that when we play our structures and work hard, we get the result, so it gives them a bit of belief and hope.”

With the benefit of hindsight, McKenna said the 119-point round one loss to Carlton was always on the cards as senior players Gary Ablett, Jared Brennan, Nathan Bock and Nathan Krakouer had little or no pre-season.

However, he said that as the club's leaders got more games into them, the youngsters had followed.

McKenna has had a policy of resting and rotating his first-year players through the first seven matches where possible, and said he thought every new player had shown him something positive.

“I don’t think there’s any boy that we’ve put out there that looks physically inept, and I think the boys have risen to that challenge,” he said.

“It’s going to be a big half of the season. We’re excited about it (and) we get to play a lot of home games at Metricon Stadium in front of our home crowd, (so) it’s going to be fantastic.

“It’s the marathon. Most marathoners say the big gorilla jumps on your back at about the 30k mark, which in footy sense that’s probably round 14 or 15. Through the physical attrition of our side we’re going to turn (players) over, and I’m looking forward to that and exposing more boys.”

McKenna is due to qualify for automatic AFL Life Membership with the Suns’ next match, its first at Metricon Stadium, against Geelong on May 28.

It will be his 300th official match since his debut as a player in 1988.

McKenna played in 267 premiership matches, 18 pre-season matches and four state of origin matches for West Coast, and has coached seven premiership matches and three pre-season matches for the GC SUNS.

The GC SUNS will have their first training run on their new ground on Sunday.