It feels strangely fitting that Scott Pendlebury is mentioned twice.

Noah Anderson has never really fit the obvious Pendlebury comparisons. But there is something distinctively Pendlebury-esque about the Gold Coast captain that has made him the perfect man to lead a SUNS side desperate to change its on-field trajectory, and a club determined to shift its culture and standing as well.

Despite being just 23 at the time, Gold Coast had no doubts in making Anderson its captain of the club for this season and beyond. There was something unique about him that made the SUNS certain he was their man.

Those traits, the type that have come to define Anderson, were present from his draft year when he tested in the 97th percentile for problem solving and intellectual function. From that moment forward, the SUNS knew they would be picking him. And when they did, they knew they would be welcoming not only an incredibly talented footballer, but a grounded, humble leader and a deep thinker as well. He was, as it turns out, their 'Pendles' in waiting.

"This is high praise but, having played with him, he's got Scott Pendlebury-type abilities to see the game and understand what needs to happen at different times," Anderson's former Gold Coast captain, Jarrod Witts, tells AFL.com.au.

"He makes in-game adjustments as good as anyone I've played with. He's probably been our best player consistently all year, first and foremost. But he's just able to understand what the game needs and the trends of the game and make adjustments as he goes."

Gold Coast, through its scouting of Anderson in his draft year, had one word it continually used to define him: Calm. It's a quality Pendlebury has in abundance and, amid the chaos of AFL football, it's that type of composed and unflappable nature that has proved worth its weight in gold for the SUNS. Both on the field as the club's star player, and off it as its captain as well.

"I would say he reminds me of someone like a Scott Pendlebury," Anderson's midfield coach at Gold Coast, Shaun Grigg, adds unprompted just moments after Witts first broaches the idea. "Having played a lot against 'Pendles', he's an organiser. He's so damaging with the ball as well.

"I just didn't know how smart Noah was. I obviously knew he was a very good player in his own right. But the way he can manipulate a stoppage … he'll make a few changes on the fly through his communication and what he sees. He's very good at manipulating that to our advantage."

Recently, AFL.com.au spent a week with Anderson and the SUNS, shadowing the new Gold Coast skipper on his day off and learning about the club's bright young leader from those who know him best.

While the manner in which Anderson has handled his status as captain, the team's best player and face of the club has seemed effortless, those inside the SUNS told the story of how it is the byproduct of a fantastic upbringing, a tireless work ethic, and intrinsically linked to the laidback lifestyle afforded to him on the Gold Coast.

DONNIE

He might be the star on the field but, back at home, Anderson doesn't come close.

There, Donnie is the real hero. A seven-month old Bernedoodle puppy, Donnie is the newest, and perhaps most attention-grabbing addition to the Anderson household. Already 30kgs, the Bernese Mountain Dog cross Poodle is still growing into his body. As Anderson carefully brews his coffee on a bright Wednesday morning, a key part of his meticulous daily routine, Donnie impatiently gnaws and paws for his own morning treats.

Anderson's partner, Charli, was desperate for Donnie, so much so she created a compelling list of reasons to convince the household it would be a good idea. But he's since brought another sense of family to the star SUN's life. Any remaining feelings of elation, frustration or anxiety brought home from footy are left at the door when Donnie is barrelling towards you for his next cuddle.

Anderson's life away from football is key to the consistency of performance he's established on the field. He lives with his partner – and now Donnie as well – along with teammates Ben Jepson and Max Knobel. His days off are spent fully recharging the batteries, enabling him to bring the type of energy he wants to his role as captain.

In the morning, he'll wake up, walk Donnie, and maybe go for a swim at the beach. He'll lay down a vinyl, with music playing an essential part in helping him switch off. Those currently on rotation range from hip hop artists like Vince Staples and Tyler, The Creator, to Britpop throwbacks like Oasis and Blur, to indie acts like Clairo and Olivia Dean.

In fact, the live music scene is perhaps the only drawback Anderson can point to when assessing life on the Gold Coast. Over the summer, he had to make the hour-long drive to Brisbane to catch one of his favourite acts in Fontaines D.C. Other times, if the opportunity is too good to pass up, he'll have to travel back to Melbourne.

Life, aside from that, is pretty good. From day one, Anderson was determined to commit everything he could to embracing the experience of living on the Gold Coast. He was empowered to do that by his parents, Dean and Fiona, who have bred a keen sense of gratitude in their son. That, according to the SUNS, is reflected in Anderson's leadership each and every day.

"That was always the goal coming here," Anderson tells AFL.com.au. "I never thought about going home after two or three years, I didn't even think about that to be honest. That's not all me, though. It's the environment they created here when I rocked up, to make me feel valued and part of something we were building."

Gold Coast turned heads when it announced Anderson as its new captain back in February, making him the youngest current skipper in the League and the 22nd youngest full-time captain in the AFL era dating back to 1990. For some clubs, there might have been a touch of trepidation in making such a decision. For the SUNS, though, they knew all along that Anderson was their man.

"I think the word is maturity," Gold Coast's head of football, Wayne Campbell, tells AFL.com.au. "There's a calmness and a clarity that he's got with the way we want the game to be played, but with people as well, that belies his relative inexperience.

"When someone starts as a captain at 23, they're only going to get better. To be honest, we probably didn't think he'd be as good as he has been. We knew he was young and would get better, but gee he's started from an extremely high level.

"You always know that leadership sits comfortably with someone when they become a better player. He was a very, very, very good player. But he's just taken it up a notch. That means it's sitting comfortably with him. That's a good sign."

Gold Coast, for its part, recognised early in Anderson's draft year that his sense of self was never tied to living in the football-mad confines of Victoria. It made the club bullish about drafting him, confident he would thrive out of the fishbowl and in the relaxed environment the SUNS were beginning to build up north.

Anderson has followed through on the club's belief. He likes watching football, but isn't obsessed. He follows no football pages on any of his social media channels, mutes the ones that do somehow flow into his algorithm, and generally stays off the grid.

He was blissfully unaware that he had shot into Brownlow Medal favouritism, or was within two votes of the lead in the AFL Coaches' award, and was just as oblivious to the fallout from Tom Stewart's brutal bump that left him dazed and wounded last month. He only realised that the Geelong defender's hit had created headlines when his mum called in the days afterwards.

"I actually don't see anything," Anderson laughs. "I feel like you can't have one without the other and, in all seriousness, I don't read anything. Living up here, you have to seek it out to find it. It doesn't come to you readily.

"I made a conscious decision not to look into any of that stuff too much. I feel like I don't need the ups for motivations, but the downs can definitely bring me down. I try to just stay pretty level-headed and really filter what kind of feedback I'm getting and try to make it come mainly through the club and my teammates and family."

THE BEACH

"I am in and out here," Anderson laughs. "I don't like sharks."

With that, Anderson races into the choppy waves of North Burleigh beach. The Gold Coast captain is a regular at that patch of surf. It's where he walks Donnie every morning, or goes simply to clear his head before and after an intense period of football.

The lovely, soaring coastline is just a five-minute walk from Anderson's place. It's also just a few minutes down from Tallebudgera, where the SUNS players often gather early in the week for their recovery sessions. In balmy late June temperatures that still manage to reach the mid-20s before 9am, it's easy to see why he has fallen for life in Queensland.

"I just think that it's the perfect environment to be a professional athlete," Anderson says.

"When you're in at the club, it's work. But when you're away, there's nothing tying you to football. You can really switch off and live a life that, for a professional athlete in terms of recovery and switching off mentally, you probably can't get close to in the rest of Australia. It's something that's so unique and something our playing group loves."

Anderson can't remember ever being recognised since arriving at Gold Coast. For someone who is genuinely one of the best players in the competition, captaining a club with finals ambitions and premiership credentials, it's a remarkable thing to consider.

It's something he's also been asked to ponder quite a lot recently. Not the desire to be recognised, but whether the depressurised environment Gold Coast provides is a good or bad thing for the club's on-field prospects. It's a theory Anderson has been challenged on throughout the season by Alex Rance, who followed senior coach Damien Hardwick from the Tigers to the SUNS as a leadership consultant.

Anderson, along with the other members of the club's leadership group – Touk Miller, Sam Collins, Ben King, Matt Rowell and Wil Powell – meet with Rance every Monday. In the last few weeks, they've debated how the club can strike a balance between the advantages of their relative anonymity up north, while maintaining a certain pressure to succeed that can be essential to driving improvement.

"It's a real discussion and an interesting discussion. It's one that I've thought about a lot," Campbell says.

"We'll always pitch it to where we are at the moment. But I genuinely feel, having been at the Giants as well, that you've got to counterbalance it with providing the right environment and – I won't say a more pressurised or competitive environment, because we all want to be competitive – but do we want to put that pressure on them inside the club? No, we want them to enjoy it and compete and become as good as they can possibly be.

"If you provide the right environment, they drive themselves. They'll push and prod and there's competition for spots. If I was to land on one side of the argument, and whether this is self-fulfilling or not, but I would say that being out of that environment where you can get away from it, I think it's an advantage."

Gold Coast, in appointing Anderson as captain, knew he would think deeply about such issues. He is not only invested in his football, but in all aspects of the club. Across the morning, he rattles off junior participation numbers in the area and shares his dream of the SUNS' playing list being made up of predominantly Queenslanders in the near future.

He weaves in those broader ambitions with an ability to bring people together. In draft interviews, Anderson told clubs he chose football over a promising junior basketball career at age 16 due to the team environment being greater. At the SUNS, that desire to empower his teammates is at the forefront of his captaincy. Recently, that's involved elevating the likes of Mac Andrew and Joel Jeffrey to various leadership positions among the playing group.

"We're pretty lucky," Anderson says. "We've got a lot of really talented young players at the club who have the potential to not only be great players but great leaders as well. So, it's trying to get them to understand the impact they can have and give them jobs and roles that can help do that.

"It's not about giving them mundane tasks, but little things around the club they can really help with and step up and pull some of the load. It's about helping to bring them along and develop them, but also to help some of the guys in the leadership group so they don't feel like they have to do as much."

FOUR-STEP PLAN

The 2020 season was basically done. It was in the books, there was nothing left to play for.

Except, if you were at Carrara, you'd think it was all on the line.

It had been a forgettable first season in the AFL system for Anderson and Gold Coast, one where the club won only five games for the year despite spending plenty of time at home amid a campaign heavily impacted by COVID-19. The only match remaining was one meaningless dead rubber, against Hawthorn in Adelaide, and the year would officially be over.

But the day before, in the club's final captain's run of the season, Anderson copped a significant cork at training. As he hobbled around later that day, barely able to walk, you could almost put a line through his chances of playing. Why bother? The Suns could easily just put him on ice and let him get an early start on his off-season holiday.

Except Anderson refused to let them do it. Instead, in the knowledge that Gold Coast would fly to Adelaide at the crack of dawn the next morning, he employed a host of the club's physios and high-performance staff to meet him at the facilities hours before sunrise. He wanted treatment, mobility exercises and a few laps in the pool to relieve the swelling before jumping on a plane. If there was a game to be played, he was playing it.

"He's tough," Gold Coast's head physiotherapist Lindsay Bull says. "He's tougher than what people think. He's missed three games in six years, two with a broken hand and one when he was really crook. That is extremely rare. He is very gritty and determined and tough. That's a very rare combination."

Anderson has a competitive drive that wants to stay ahead of every trend in the game. It's why, on every day off, he still makes the time to head into the club's headquarters and complete at least one phase of a four-step plan that is essential to his weekly routine. On the drive into People's First Stadium, Anderson meticulously lays out the four steps in their entirety.

The first is what he calls 'Move Early'. It gets him into the physical rhythm of the week. Usually, it involves 10 laps of the club's 50m pool, with each lap completed on the minute. These must be finished before the club's leadership meeting with Rance on the Monday morning, and are usually done in tandem with his good friend Rowell.

The next step is to watch vision by Thursday's main training session. On this particular Wednesday morning, this is the reason why he's at the club on his day off. He gets a massage, then spends an hour or so combing through opposition reports, stoppage drills, running patterns, and footage from last week's game to ensure he's thoroughly prepared for what's to come.

The third step is what he describes as 'Mentals'. Ahead of every match, Anderson writes down his thoughts in a journal. It chronicles the week just gone, the game ahead, what he's anxious about, what he's confident in, and much more. It helps him unpack any thoughts and feelings that have lingered with him across the last few days.

Finally, there's extra touch work after Thursday's main session. Normally, there's a group of SUNS that stay back for the additional drills, but Anderson, Rowell and Miller are the constants. The club's star midfield trio share an endless appetite to improve, no matter the day or the conditions.

The four-step plan crystallised in Anderson's mind during COVID-19. Having always been a creature of habit, a then-teenage Anderson pondered what would happen if those habits were broken? How could he feel prepared if the pandemic forced a game to be played earlier than usual? Or if an injury meant he couldn't train that week?

Together with the SUNS' high-performance manager, Alex Rigby, he created the plan – with a list of steps that were achievable no matter what the week threw at him – so he would always feel prepared for anything that lay ahead.

"When Noah came in, unlike any other player, his maturity and curiosity on how to get better was pretty amazing," Rigby tells AFL.com.au. "For an 18-year-old kid, he came in like a seven or eight-year player.

"He's so curious. His curiosity around performance is also pretty infectious. 'What can I do here? Would this work? Would that work?' We have really open discussions, rather than one-way discussions around performance. He takes what he needs and sets it into his program and off he goes."

Grigg, who also coached at Richmond and Geelong before following Hardwick to Gold Coast, has seen Anderson's thirst for knowledge first-hand. From the moment he arrived at People's First Stadium, there were endless questions about what made Dustin Martin and Patrick Dangerfield so good, or what made Trent Cotchin and Joel Selwood such inspirational leaders.

"I knew he was a very good player from coaching against him for a few years," Grigg says. "But getting to know him intimately, the leadership was oozing out of him when we first got here. He was a real leader. That speaks to the way he prepares and the way he's also open to get better as well. He was obviously a young star of the competition, but he's very open to getting better and how he can do that."

FULL HOUSE

The buy-in isn't big, but the games are still ultra-competitive.

A couple of nights every week, a small group of Gold Coast players will gather for the poker games that have become almost like a meditative process for a small collection of star SUNS footballers. Anderson, Rowell, King and Charlie Ballard all take turns to host, with Knobel and a few others also joining in every now and then.

The group all live virtually on top of each other in a small neighbourhood pocket in the Burleigh region of Gold Coast. They're so close Anderson will ride his bike over whenever he's not hosting. They'll play cards, have a bite to eat, and chat about anything and everything that isn't football.

It's this type of family feel that Gold Coast has been attempting to foster since its inception, and an element of the club that has been steadily building for some time now. The SUNS are confident that the retention issues that plagued their formative years in the AFL are over, replaced by a sense they could soon become a destination for the competition's best players.

That perception was underlined when Gold Coast ripped away Daniel Rioli and John Noble during last year's Trade Period, both contracted players at big Victorian clubs in Richmond and Collingwood respectively. It was a view that was strengthened further just last month when Rowell turned down significant offers to return to Victoria and signed a two-year extension to stay.

The fact that Rowell later admitted it was the first time he seriously considered the prospect of leaving, but still came to the decision to remain at the SUNS, only emboldened Gold Coast's confidence in its future even further.

Anderson himself can't see his playing career anywhere else. Already signed through until his free agency campaign in 2027, his entire life – partner, dog and football included – is now on the Gold Coast. Through his early years in the AFL, he would return to Melbourne on every three-day break. That became every five-day break, then every bye, then every off-season. Now, he hardly ever goes back. Even in the summer, when he's not on an overseas holiday, he'll be at his home away from home.

But he's not unique in that regard. A couple of years ago, Campbell was pleasantly surprised when he saw a large group of the club's non-Queensland contingent back on the Gold Coast for their New Year's Eve party, having been home for Christmas just a few days earlier. To the football boss, it was a sign the club was trending in the right direction.

"Every club's responsibility is to provide an environment where the players feel like they can get the best out of themselves," Campbell says. "Maybe we didn't do that for the first part of our journey. But it feels like, in the last four or five years, we've been able to do that.

"That's each touch point they have within a footy department. Whether it's the coaches, high-performance, Alex Rance's leadership, the medical department, welfare and wellbeing, you want them to look around and think that quality people with great technical skills are here to help them. That's our responsibility as a club, to ensure that we do that."

The signs of progress have all been positive. Gold Coast has an impressive 10-5 record, has been elevated to host its first ever Friday night blockbuster when it takes on Collingwood in a game with significant September implications this week, and later this season hopes it will finally – after 15 long years – break its finals duck.

And you can be sure that if, and perhaps when, the SUNS do play finals football later this season, one Gold Coast player will be ready for the pressure, intensity and expectation that is bound to follow.

"I'm holding Noah to those standards around what it takes to be a finals captain and a good finals player and he's very receptive to that," Grigg says.

"He wants to get better and wants to learn and wants to be coached hard. I just want to see him play the way he can in those big games. Collingwood on a Friday night, finals when we get there, I'm excited for him to take that next step.

"He's crying out for it. He's desperate for it. He's urgent for it. He's a winner and he brings others along. I'm very lucky, as a coach, to coach him and I'm excited to see him keep growing."