Tara Murray
After an extensive process, Whittlesea believes it has the right man to steer them up the Northern Football League division 1 ladder.
The Eagles this week announced they had appointed Wayne Van Der Ross as senior coach for next season.
Van Der Ross had a successful playing career before having several assistant coaching roles in the Eastern Football League.
More recently he was senior coach at Know in 2020, while he was senior coach at Yarra Glen the last two seasons in the Outer Eastern Football League.
New Eagles president Adrian Stewart said they were really excited about what Van Der Ross will bring to the club.
“He comes with great experience and really good people skills,” he said.
“He’s got a lot of great ideas and some things that the boys need to improve on.”
Stewart said Van Der Ross was the 12th person they spoke to about coaching the club in the process as they looked to cover all bases.
He said Van Der Ross had put a lot of work in before he got to the interview.
“One thing I will give him a lot of credit for is the research that he did,” he said.
“He’s spent a lot of time in the Eastern league and the Outer Eastern and played in the eastern suburbs.
“He knew everything about the club and the players and he watched a lot of games and knew the game style.
“He had picked up on some deficiencies and some things we need to improve on over time.”
Van Der Ross comes into a side that finished ninth with four wins in their first full season back up in division 1 after winning the division 2 premiership in 2019.
The club parted ways with premiership winning coach Blair Harvey midway through this year.
Stewart said they had a lot of pieces of the puzzle there, they just needed someone to put it all together.
“We think we’ve got a list that can go far with a lot of local talent, but we haven’t achieved anything so far,” he said.
“We’ve got good local support in terms of assistant coaches, we just needed someone to steer us in the right direction.
“If everyone buys into what Wayne brings, we’ll see some improvement. It might not be in round one, but we’ll see a vast improvement over the year and for years to come.”
Stewart said the club believed that it had the ability to be a consistent division 1 club contending for finals year in, year out.
Off field, Stewart was recently appointed president after being secretary for the last five years.
He said everything was heading in the right direction.
“We have a close knit group looking after the club,” he said.
“There’s good junior parents coming through and there’s some good people who will help the club.
“The club’s in a good place.”
