Chief cook and bottle washer part of job: Bluey

WHEN Guy McKenna was boiling the lunchtime pasta for his Gold Coast players after training in the early days, 100 AFL matches must have felt like an eternity away.

Inaugural coach McKenna reckons he would have “sounded like a broken record” to Charlie Dixon, Rory Thompson and Zac Smith, the only players who made it to the AFL list from the club’s 2009 TAC Cup team.

“It was really like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, it wasn’t as if we had the list from day one and then had them for two years,” McKenna said.

“I remember the conditioning fella at the time, Andrew Weller, and I would run off the track after training, the boys would do a warm down and we’d start cooking lunches for the boys, putting the pasta on and all sorts of things.

“Certainly in those first couple of years you weren’t just a football coach, you had to do a lot of things.

“I remember at one of our first staff meetings there were just six people sitting around the table, so things have certainly grown since day one.”

Travis Auld joined the club as chief executive in 2009 and experienced plenty of memorable “firsts”.

While the obvious milestones rate highly – the first win against Port Adelaide, a home victory against GWS after an 18-month wait, Gary Ablett’s Brownlow Medal and Jaeger O’Meara’s Rising Star award – he also talks fondly of less publicised moments.

“Our first win in the VFL, our property steward had to hold up the words because it was the first time we’d actually rolled out our new song,” said Auld, now an AFL executive.

“Some of our players, who are still on the list today were doing Year 12. I remember having players over home from time to time helping them with their Year 12 assignments.”