According to Dean Souter, Junior High Performance Manager with the Raiders, the club has made a concerted effort in recent years to “cast a pretty wide footprint” across the areas surrounding the ACT in order to capitalize on a multitude of young talent. 

Yass youngsters Jayden Caldwell (Under-15s), Kaidan Bell and Joshua Sykes (both Under-14s), have all been selected to train with the respective development squads, along with 26 others out of 66 selected who are from regional New South Wales. 

The Under-13s, Under-14s, and Under-15s programs are relatively new additions to the club, and were brought in over the last two years to help acclimatise the players to the challenges of representative football. 

“It’s basically just an opportunity for these guys to come into an environment where the training is probably a little more rigorous and the skills work is a little bit more focused,” Souter said. 

“It also allows us to keep an eye on their development, get to know the kids a little bit, slowly introduce them to what junior representative football will look like, which kicks in about age 16.

“Once they’ve had one or two seasons in the development program, it’s not such a shock to the system when they start trialing for junior representative stuff.”

Souter says that one of the reasons the development squads were introduced was also to try and keep as many kids involved in rugby league in Canberra as possible. 

“They get into high school age and they start to experiment with other sports and get pulled in all different directions [...] If we can put a little bit of excitement into staying with league then that’s obviously going to be a benefit to the game.”

According to Souter, a number of players have moved from union to league in recent times, and he believes that this is evidence of the success of the program. 

“I guess it’s something that all sports are fighting with at the moment, just retaining your numbers and growing your numbers. I think that we [the Raiders] were in a position to do more, so we’ve done that.”

“It’s paying dividends quite early in the piece.”

The Raiders’ representative programs have an extensive history of success, having produced players such as the Papalii brothers, Jack White, Edrick Lee, Jack Wighton, Anthony Milford, and most recently Nick Cotric, who debuted for the club this year.