By Matt Fotia
The most active club in the transfer window this year, Coldstream are well aware that talent won’t get you where you want to be, but hard work will ahead of their 2020 campaign.
The Cougars suffered an indifferent start to their 2019 season, sitting on three wins and three losses after the first seven rounds of the year. They wouldn’t lose another game in the home and away season however, stringing together 10 wins on the bounce to enter the finals series as the form side.
Coach Chad Rogers says that their incredible run of wins took too much out of his players as they slumped to a straight sets exit from the Division Four finals.
“The end of the year was just the fact that we’d won 10 in a row and done everything we possibly could to get that second spot and we’d spent everything and we didn’t give a yelp in the finals,” said the well respected coach.
Coldstream ran out of gas in 2019. Photo Field of View Sports Photography
The Cougars have taken it all in their stride and are well prepared for the eventual 2020 season.
“The pre-season has been fantastic and things were looking pretty promising, we have worked hard on fitness and physicality,”
“This group is a young group and they’re just slowly maturing and it’s getting to the stage now where they’re about to hit their footballing prime.”
The Cougars have brought more than a handful of recruits on board for 2020, with over 10 players putting pen to paper across the off-season, with a focus on finding some on field leaders such as Jarrod Witnish and Leigh Warne from Phillip Island.
“The focus was getting some leadership in amongst the younger fellas and driving that on field leadership, so that players aren’t reliant on the coaches telling them what to do,”
“The recruiting drive itself actually just came from a lot of the players who had a lot of contacts having previously played with guys and it presented an opportunity for us to get those guys across.”
Powerful marking forward Lachlan Koger has crossed over from Lilydale whilst Darcy Fritsch returns from Premier Division side Norwood. Both players have impressed Rogers this pre-season.
“Koger should provide us with another big tall frame and his pre-season has been fantastic he’s been really good with his voice on the training track,”
“He’ll be a really good target for us going forward, something that we didn’t really have consistently last year, so we’re really looking forward to seeing him play.”
“You can just see that he’s (Fritsch) brought back what he’s been doing at Casey and Norwood, his fitness is really good and he’s grown a lot as a person so his talk on the track has been really good and he’s bought some ideas for the coaches.”
With all of these new recruits plus the departure of both of the 2019 grand finalists, Coldstream are everyone’s favourite to take out the Division Four premiership in 2020.
Rogers says his crew know the job won’t be that easy.
“It doesn’t matter how much talent you have you’ve still got to work hard for it – East Burwood’s probably had the best list the last couple of years but still couldn’t win it – it doesn’t just happen.”
Like all members of society Rogers and Coldstream have moved the goalposts for the near future, shifting the focus from winning a premiership to keeping the community safe during the Covid-19 outbreak.
“The players will stay connected, we might be individuals but we can still work together as a group via online activities,”
“But the most important thing is our community stays safe.”
