None of them were developed by you lot, which is the point. Most were playing senior league in either Queensland or country NSW (or NZ). Good recuitment of young guns, yes, but the ones actually developed by you guys through your junior system are marked as such.
Very few players make it into first grade playing for the team that is represented by the area where their parents live.
Most clubs identify young players playing in the youth comps around the country and then bring them to their clubs to be developed through the youth system which is now the NYC.
There appear to be 15 junior clubs in the Cronulla Sutherland area for example. Now what level of involvement and development, funding etc does the Cronulla club have with those fifteen clubs from their area? Did they set them up? Do the Cronulla board appoint people to run those clubs? Do they choose the managers, the programs, the training regimes, the trainers etc or is that left to the individual clubs to organise themselves?
Just who are the young juniors actually playing for? Other than Souths juniors (a completely separate entity from South Sydney) all junior players pay a fee to register to play for a local club - they're not enticed to play by the first grade clubs themselves.
Please bear in mind that this is a genuine query and I'm not being funny. But it seems to me that supporters seem to place a massive level of emphasis on where people happened to be living when kids first became interested in Rugby League and they seem to place all the kudos and thanks to the actual clubs for developing the skills of these kids.
Where to my way of thinking, the Juniors clubs don't seem to have as direct a link to the actual clubs in their districts as we're possibly led to believe.
Now I'm happy to be proven wrong, but surely recognising the talents of a young player and bringing them through the set up at your club from youth team to first grade is just as important, if not more so than where that person happened to start playing junior football.
