DEW’S THE MAN
GC SUNS COACH’S NEW DEAL
SECRETS are near impossible to keep in football but the coach at the centre of the most highprofile contract negotiations managed to keep his deal quiet for the best part of this year.
The Gold Coast Suns will announce a two-year contract extension for coach Stuart Dew on Wednesday in a deal that extends his tenure to five years by the end of 2022.
Dew’s contract extension has been at the forefront of talks in football circles throughout the season and when the competition was halted by COVID-19.
Suns hierarchy approached Dew about a new deal during the pre-season and the twotime AFL premiership player agreed but once the pandemic arrived both parties decided to hold off on putting pen to paper until the competition resumed.
Despite knowing he was staying, the club and Dew chose to hold off on announcing it out of respect for their colleagues who were stood down due to the COVID-19 crisis.
The selfless decision made Suns CEO Mark Evans and the members of Gold Coast’s board even more confident they had the right man to lead the Suns forward.
Evans and Suns chairman Tony Cochrane have remained bullish about Dew’s future at the club, despite Gold Coast already previously sacking Guy McKenna and Rodney Eade in their opening years.
Dew is the man Evans and Cochrane hired to lift the Suns off the bottom of the ladder and after a shaky start, winning four games in 2018 and three in 2019, Gold Coast looks likely to significantly improve its win-loss record in 2020.
The new deal provides Dew with five years to ensure Gold Coast becomes a premiership force and a team that can have a sustained run at a flag.
But it hasn’t been an easy project for Dew, 40, so far.
When the former Sydney Swans assistant arrived in 2018, Gold Coast had been crippled by injury for multiple years under Eade while the likes of Gary Ablett, Jaeger O’Meara, Dion Prestia and Adam Saad had previously left.
Former co-captains and bookends Tom Lynch and Steven May would exit at the end of Dew’s first season at the helm while Jack Martin and Callum Ah Chee left at the end of 2019.
The 2018 Commonwealth Games forced Dew and his men to go on the road for large parts of his debut season where he mulled over the list, made it a priority to sought out the salary cap and began teaching the players a new game style.
Among the masterstrokes of Dew and his team, including football manager Jon Haines and list manager Craig Cameron, were making was the appointment of Alex Rigby as high-performance manager.
Together the group had to first condition the players to be able to handle the training loads, produce that over four quarters and most recently to add the speed required to play the fast and attractive football Dew wants.
Dew’s fingerprints are well and truly on the Suns, with two crops of high-end draft picks including 2018 selections Jack Lukosius, Izak Rankine, Ben King and pre-draft picks Sam Collins, Josh Corbett and Chris Burgess.
He also added mature-age recruits Anthony Miles, Jack Hombsch and George HorlinSmith to improve the depth and help the development of the young high-end talents acquired through the draft.
In 2019 he secured Matt Rowell, Noah Anderson, Sam Flanders, Jeremy Sharp and traded in Brandon Ellis and Hugh Greenwood.
Virtually all of the core group have either re-signed for the upcoming two years or voiced their desire to do so, giving Dew ample to work with as he aims to do what no other coach has done at the Suns – make the finals.
The announcement of Dew’s new deal could be the stimulus needed for the Suns to secure a new membership record.
The Gold Coast is less than 600 members off passing its all-time membership record of 14,131, set when the fledgling club played in its inaugural AFL season in 2011.