HUGE TEAM ON GROUND

QHow does the club look after such a wide footprint? On your busiest days, you must have people situated all over North Queensland. What does that look like and how do you manage that?

AWe have a footprint that’s bigger than the state of New South Wales and that’s really important to us. During the season, we have different people from different parts of our club all over the place. You’ve got players in Cairns, Townsville and Mackay on any given weekend, whether they’re playing NRL or through our feeder teams, then we’ve got our development staff, who travel up to 40,000km a year throughout our footprint, so they could be anywhere at anytime. You put that in with our community staff, who travel just as much these days and deliver these really fantastic education-based programs throughout schools right up to the tip and right out west to Mt Isa and the like as well. Then you have our commercial team, and we’re really fortunate with our partners, in particular Toyota, where our partnership encompasses the dealerships up to Cairns, out to Mt Isa and down to Mackay. We have academies all throughout our footprint, with staff looking through the next generation of Cowboys players. Add to that our Women’s Academy, which has this year morphed into the North Queensland Toyota Gold Stars. You’ve got all these people on the road at one time and it comes down to the people we’ve got. I’m really proud of the type of people we have here and the passion they have for their job. I think it’s really important that we have that and we’re really proud of that and that’s why we are the North Queensland Cowboys.