Cairns to Rectify "Embarrassing" NBL22

Thursday, August 18, 2022

There’s likely nobody in Cairns who wants the Taipans to improve as much as head coach Adam Forde this season

By Dan Woods - NBL Media

There’s likely nobody in Cairns who wants the Taipans to improve as much as head coach Adam Forde.

After a disappointing campaign that saw his side finish ninth last season, Forde believes he has the pieces in place to drive that improvement.

The Taipans have gone hard in altering their roster makeup by bringing in sought after local talents Sam Waardenburg and Jonah Antonio and import DJ Hogg, crucially retaining the services of Most Improved winner Keanu Pinder, Rookie of the Year winner Bul Kuol and star import Tahjere McCall, while also upgrading injury replacement player Ben Ayre to a full contract.

Forde says the recruitment and retention drive was motivated by hopes of returning to the tried and tested method the Taipans have used to establish competitive sides in the past.

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“A big motivation for us to really hit the ground running is our embarrassing performance last season. There were a lot of factors that were out of our control obviously, but I’m not going to use injuries and Covid as an excuse because that impacted a lot of other people,” Forde told The Huddle.

“As soon as the game was over against Brisbane at home, we were in the office the next day and that’s when we started getting our list rolling … we wanted to target four particular areas and we didn’t necessarily want to recycle the same old names.

“If you look at the success of the teams in the last decade and a half, those teams that have had good and continued success have had a local contingent. We wanted to try and knock this out of the park.

“We wanted to make sure we had this great local contingent we could invest in and have this growth mindset together … similar to what Cairns used to be with Nathan Sobey, Cam Gliddon, Clint Steindl coming out of college and using this platform."

So the Taipans had armed themselves with a strong recruiting strategy and identity. The next stage was to bring in the right players.

Sam Waardenburg was top of Forde’s wish list, but he was also of interest to a number of other NBL clubs. Young Australian talls who impressed in the NCAA don’t grow on trees after all.

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The eventual successful recruitment of the former University of Miami forward follows not only the recruiting strategy implemented by Forde and his team, but was inspired by the performances of another NBL side last season.

“Referencing (JackJumpers head coach) Scott Roth, we wanted to get guys who are ‘hungry and humble’, who want to do extras without being asked. We wanted to target guys who have ambitions of the NBA,” Forde said.

“Alright, what’s our identity? Let’s go young. Let’s get guys who are robust, let’s go with guys like Bul and Keanu who can play through injury, and if they do get hurt their recovery time is a bit quicker knowing we don’t have to manage older bodies, [and a] big guy on our hit list for that was Sam Waardenburg.

“We played Perth in Perth and we lost. The very next morning I’m doing a Zoom recruitment meeting with him to try and convince him of all the good reasons to come to Cairns, which is hard to do considering we got our butts handed to us by Perth the night before. We wanted to paint this picture of a young, athletic, run and gun fast-paced team.

“I’m feeling good with the names we recruited but now it’s about piecing them together."