The call that changed Harris Andrews’ life
Future is rosy for Dew: CEO
IT was the phone call that changed a young man’s life and ultimately altered the destiny of a football club, too.
Harris Andrews is a captain-in-waiting at the Lions but throughout Year 11 he was a bit lost. His mum Wendy was urging him to knuckle down with his studies and he was kicking around the idea of being a teacher.
All he really wanted to do was play footy.
The problem was while most draft hopefuls are on the radar of AFL clubs from age 16, no one was watching the kid fromAspley that closely.
A call from Mark Perkins, the footy manager at the Aspley Hornets and a close family friend, to the head of the Brisbane Lions academy Luke Curran changed that.
Andrews was in the middle of an 80-goal season for the Hornet’s Colts and Perkins was convinced he was an AFL player in the making.
“I remember ringing Luke Curran saying, ‘You need to have a look at this kid’,’’ Perkins said.
“So I like to think I had a bit of input into it. I certainly don’t mind suggesting to Harris that he owes me a little kickback there from all the money he’s going to make as an AFL star.’’
Incredibly, Andrews had never made a state team through under 12s, 14s and 16s, so while some of those kids join the Lions academy at 12, he had never been in the program.
Curran is happy to admit the pestering from Perkins sparked his interest and reckons one game was enough to convince him Harris had to be there when the academy started its pre-season.
“Perko said we’ve got this tall kid who is going OK and when I saw him first-hand, I thought he’s going better than OK,’’ he said.
“We invited him (to the academy) at the end of his 17th year and then 12 months later he was drafted.’’
Lions footy manager Dean Warren remembers watching him play as a top-up for the Lions in the NEAFL against Northern Territory at the Gabba that year.
“I said to Leppa (coach Justin Leppitsch) this kid is going to be a star,’’ he said.
“His 18th year was extraordinary and he went from strength to strength.’’
Warren, now CEO of AFLQ, says the Andrews’ story has become an unofficial part of the coaching manual in Queensland footy.
“We talk about Harris all the time because it is a great story for coaches to tell kids: if you are not in at 12, 14 or 16, just keep persevering,’’ he said. SEVEN wins across almost two seasons won’t be the criteria Stuart Dew is judged on when Gold Coast assess the coach’s long-term viability at the club. Dual AFL premiership player Dew still has a season to run on his maiden senior coaching contract.
The Suns, in their ninth AFL season, have never finished higher than 12th and will collect the wooden spoon in 2019 after losing 17 straight games since a promising 3-1 start.
But chief executive Mark Evans indicated Dew’s future looked rosy on the Gold Coast, even suggesting the club would look to hire an experienced figure in a head of coaching role to “speed up that development”.
“Stuart’s shown us he has some great traits that we think will stand him in very good stead to be a senior coach for a long time and to deliver success and we want that to be at the Gold Coast Suns,” Evans said.
“He has a great way of connecting to players, a great football brain and is so eager to learn. We think that’s more important than Xs and Os.”
Vice-captain Touk Miller will play his 100th AFL game in Sunday’s final round against GWS and is choosing to look deeper than their win-loss record.
“I’ve seen a lot of progression and in the last couple of years especially with Stuey Dew coming on and a lot of new faces,” he said.
Evans said the club wouldn’t rush to appoint any extra coaching support given it had “been a bizarre and tumultuous time in football”.
“We would consider anything we thought would speed up that development (of Dew),” he said. “We can make our assessments at the end of the year.”