By Tyler Lewis
“It’s about time we became relevant.”
Devon Meadows’ signing of ex-St Kilda and Melbourne player Dean Kent on Thursday night is just the beginning of coach Ryan Hendy’s mission to put his footy club on the map.
Kent, 28, played 63 matches for Melbourne and 37 for St Kilda across his nine-season-100-game AFL career.
The crafty left-footer puts pen to paper at Glover Reserve after six months of discussions.
“We had been talking for a while, he lives in Botanic Ridge and has a few mates at Devon Meadows,” Hendy said.
“It was in the pipeline for a good six months, we just wanted to let him finish off, enjoy his last year at St Kilda and as soon as his season finished we were straight onto him… we didn’t want to muck around with it.
“Getting Dean is going to be a massive help, last year we lacked on-field leadership.
“We nullified the points where think we need to improve on to get that ultimate success next year and we needed to get some leadership into the club, Dean is a perfect fit for that.
“We also feel we need a key forward who we will be trying to get pretty hard and another key position player.”
Devon Meadows had previously been an inauspicious club before Hendy signed on as senior coach last summer, regularly failing to make finals, as well as obtaining an inability to secure a big name.
But since, the Panthers have added the boom recruits of Brandon White and Nick Battle, had four-time AFL premiership player Luke Hodge play for the club and now have another ex-AFL player in Dean Kent.
Hendy puts it down to the domino effect of bringing in good people, while also hinting the Panthers certainly aren’t finished with the signature of Kent.
“There are people at the club that have been starving for success for so long,” he said.
“You get good people into your club, more good people want to come and follow you.
“That’s been the key, we don’t want to get any Joe-blow in, we want good people into the footy club, and we think if we do that it attracts good people to want to play footy for you.
“We do definitely have a few big, big names in the pipeline that we’re pretty confident in signing in the next week or two.
“At the moment, we more or less have put our focus into Dean and we’re really happy with the position we’re in at the moment.
“We’ve signed 95 percent of our list from last year, we have a couple more, and we shouldn’t be losing anyone.”
