As part of Melbourne Storm’s affiliation with its feeder clubs the Sunshine Coast Falcons, Brisbane Tigers and more recently, North Sydney Bears, there will be some fresh faces donning the purple jersey when Storm runs out for its pre-season trials.
A new crop of players from the Falcons, Tigers and Bears have been put through their paces throughout Storm’s NRL pre-season, with players getting the opportunity to translate what they’ve learnt over the first few months of training in that first trial match.
Getting the chance to learn from the best, players can not only develop their own game in an NRL environment but hopefully impress the coaching staff ahead of the 2024 season.
Boasting a mix of experience and youth amongst this year’s batch of feeder players to travel south for pre-season, Melbourne Storm NRL development coach Todd Lowrie said training with the NRL side during this period is a great opportunity for the players involved as well as the club.
“I think they’ve all done really well, they’ve all fitted in very quickly,” Lowrie said.
“Some have done pre-season at other clubs but for a few they’ve never trained this way before so it’s a good chance to come down for a few weeks and put themselves on show,” he said.
“We have strong relationships with our feeder clubs, it allows us to give guys from those clubs an opportunity and gives us a good look at guys who might not have been on our radar and then we can monitor them for the rest of the year,” he said.
As has been the case over the past seven years, the affiliation program has produced some strong NRL talent, with the likes of Nicho Hynes, Chris Lewis, Grant Anderson and Alec MacDonald just a few of examples of players that translated strong pre-season showings into full-time NRL gigs.
“Every year for the last seven years we have signed someone from the train and trial system, Nicho Hynes is the perfect example of a guy who came down without a contract and trained and look at him now,” Lowrie said.
Impressed by the group’s attitude and work rate over the first few weeks of pre-season, Lowrie said he was excited to see those players get their chance in the Storm jersey.
“The exciting thing for us this year is that all of our feeder players will get to play in the first trial match, getting to play a game in the Melbourne Storm jersey,” he said.
“It’s a new concept but it’s great that they get to have a game in the Storm jersey as in previous years not all players got that opportunity.”
Fans can see Storm’s new recruits in action at the various Open Training sessions being held around Melbourne over the coming weeks.
