Ruck Takes Charge Of The Colts

Recently the Perth Football Club announced that Andrew Ruck would be the new colts coach in 2016.

Ruck who has spent the past two seasons as League Assistant Coach will take over a team that last played in the finals in 2013.

Ruck played 74 games for Claremont in a career that was cut short by a knee injury he suffered in 2011.  He was arguably one of if not the best ruckman in the WAFL before he got injured.  While he was still playing and since he has retired Ruck has been gaining valuable experience coaching at PSA level, development squads and with the State 15’s.

“I coached the year 10’s at Wesley in the Private Schools Association for a couple of years.  Before that I was involved with the State 15’s program for three to four seasons and I spent the same amount of time doing development squads at Claremont.”

Assisting him will be Glenn Davies and Paul Pannell while Trevor Williams will also be helping out in his new role as Director of Coaching Colts and Development.

“Trevor Williams will be overseeing everything.  He has got a wealth of experience and he has coached in his own right at league level and won two premierships at colt’s level.”

“Glenn Davies has been an assistant for about eight to ten years and is a guy that I can lean on who has had lots of experience at colt’s level.”

“Paul Pannell coached the West Australian Country Football team a few years ago and has been coaching in the South West Football League.”

There will be some familiar faces running around for the Demons in 2016 but there will also be plenty of new ones with roughly half the squad from last year either progressing to the senior squad or moving on.

“We have got a pretty exciting group of 16’s coming through from last year.  These guys have played pretty well at 16’s level and now they need to step up and hopefully drive some of the older guys in the colts group.”

Over the preseason so far there has been a big emphasis on skills and skill development with Ruck keen to see this area improve not only this season but in the years to come.

“At the moment I think probably the biggest area of weakness at the Perth Football Club is our skill development.”

“We started out this preseason looking at the players techniques and trying to identify where we needed to put more emphasis on.”

According to Ruck players to impress so far this preseason are Trent Simpson (2 games), John Levien (23 games), Brenton Scaddan-Blair (5 games) and Josh Scaddan-Blair (6 games).

“Trent Simpson has come a long way in a year.  He has become one of our elite runners and we are really looking forward to seeing him step up this year.”

“We also have John Levien who has been involved in the State 15’s and 16’s program and we’ll be looking for a big year from him.”

“The Scaddan-Blair brothers are constantly in the top two or three in the running and are really setting the tone on the conditioning side of things.  Their work rate has been really impressive.”