Q and A with Dave Wessels

http://www.foxsports.com.au/rugby/su...73761c1d6e4e4e

A LITTLE known 33-year-old from South Africa is the new Force head coach.

Sam Worthington chats with Dave Wessels, a man on a Super Rugby mission.

Foxsports.com.au: You are not particularly well known to the casual Australian rugby fan. What is your background and what made you decide to become a career coach at such a young age?

Wessels: I guess the decision was made for me because I was actually terrible as a player.

I was no chance of making it as a player.

I played in the back-row, I liked to think of myself as a good openside flanker but I was pretty terrible to be fair.

But there was something special about the game, even though I wasn’t special as a player.

There’s something that I’ve always loved about rugby and certainly in my family, rugby is a pretty big deal.

The best way for me to stay involved with it, to realise some of the dreams that I had, to be in rugby professionally, was to start coaching.

So I started coaching early on.

I started with under-9s which is more like herding cats than it was coaching.

And from there I’ve just been incredibly lucky with the people that I’ve met along the way and the people that have helped me.

I certainly wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am now without all those people’s help.

Nice piece from Fox about Dave Wessels. Also mentions that some signing announcements are imminent. Also talks of the great work being done in terms of developing our local juniors.

Foxsports.com.au: There has been a lot of chatter about the future of the Force, who have a small but passionate supporter base. What is the rugby landscape like in Western Australia?

Wessels: At the end of the season I was lucky enough to receive some interest from other teams.

And one of the big reasons why I decided to stay in Perth was I felt that there’s something really bubbling away under the surface here.

If you look at that Brumbies game, the last game of the season, we played seven locally-produced players.

You look at a guy like Dane Haylett-Petty and what he’s doing with the Wallabies, and then there’s a number of guys who will feature in our squad, who have come through our Future Force program.

There are a number of things that are happening through our junior levels, that are starting to bear fruit at an elite level.

And when you think about it, the Force is only 10 years old and the players coming through now, were probably six or seven years old when the Force was founded.

And so that cycle is just starting to take hold and we’re just starting to see the fruits of that.

And the second piece is when the team was successful, in the early years when we had some star players, the average crowd was around 28,000.

So that’s a significant crowd compared to some of the crowds that the other franchises are getting.

So I actually feel that there’s a community of expats, in particular, here — and local Western Australians — that will really support rugby if we can get things right on the field and play the type of rugby that they can be proud of.

I guess I’m just really excited by that upside.

If we can start to produce some outcomes, then I feel like the community is going to get right in behind us.

There’s something bubbling away just right under the surface that I think is quite exciting.