By ADEM SARICAOGLU
STEVE Toy’s 2014 Keilor Thunder men’s team will have a fairly different look about it from the one led by Peter Jukes this season just gone.
Toy has been announced as Jukes’ replacement in the head coaching role while Andrew Freeman, Matthew Lynch and Brent Radoslovic will all be missing from the hardwood next season.
“It’ll be a very different look for the team this year and a lot of the young guys from the youth leagues will come up and play with us this year,” Toy explained.
“We won’t be big.
“We lost a couple of our talls from last year but I think we’re going to be really competitive in other ways. You can always make up for your shortcomings in other ways.”
Jukes led the Thunder to the Division Two grand final series in 2013 but his team was comfortably swept by the Melton Thoroughbreds in two.
However Toy will go into the new season confident his new-look squad will have what it takes to again be a force, but doesn’t feel the need to recruit big during the summer.
“Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to be able to do that,” Toy said.
“We’ve always had the mentality that we’d prefer to promote from within anyway.
“At the moment I think I’ve got six or seven guys that played youth league last year in the squad, and I would expect that most of them will play pretty hefty minutes this year.
“We’re looking to blood some of the younger guys from the youth league last year so it’ll be a bit of a rebuilding year, but we’re confident we can be really successful and really competitive.”
To counter Keilor’s lack of size, Toy said the key to pre-season preparation will be fitness.
“We didn’t have any big guys turn up to the try-outs so we’re going to be fast,” Toy said.
“We’re going to be athletic, we’re going to be as aggressive as we possibly can and that’ll be our basis for the year.”
