The sleepy beach town of Wooli in northern NSW isn't a place many would associate with the formation of a new AFL team.
But it was on that spectacular, narrow peninsula about 330km south of Brisbane when the soon-to-be-launched Gold Coast Football Club settled on the theme song which would be heartily sung after every win.
Ahead of the Suns' launch for the 2011 season, inaugural chairman John Witheriff hosted some of Australian rules football's leading executives and decision-makers at his beach house to discuss some of the key issues ahead of club's inaugural campaign.
While topics like list concessions, stadium builds, community engagement, and broadcast rights were focuses of conversation, also on the agenda was settling on the club's official song.
Witheriff recalls taking the group of AFL executives and Queensland business and football leaders to the low-key bowls club with a decision needing to be made about the song.
“There were a number of songs [as options],” he told Zero Hanger's AFL Team Builders podcast.
“I took these executives, including the AFL executive, down to my beach house in northern NSW – a little village called Wooli. We all got together and everyone came along to the bowls club and started to listen to some of those songs throughout the day.
“The current song grew on us and as the night progressed, we'd all had a couple of beers, and the song felt OK as we were singing it walking back to the house, and that was where the song was born.
“Looking back, they're all fairly serious individuals but it was a great atmosphere and we were able to work through a pretty challenging issue [of choosing the best song].”
The lyrics of the song include “we play to win the flag for you – fight, fight, fight till we hold up the cup” but it's safe to say, 13 years into their existence as the AFL's second club in Queensland, the Suns have fallen a long way short of those expectations.
However, much like their cross-town rivals Brisbane in 1987, the Suns had to overcome a series of daunting challenges in building a club in a non-traditional market.
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They had to find a way to raise funds for the redevelopment of Carrara Stadium, build facilities for players and administration, make their presence felt in a market that had traditionally been a graveyard for professional sporting teams, and find a way to boost participation at the grassroots level, among others.
And it's easy to forget that Gold Coast's formation essentially happened by accident. In the mid-2000s, the AFL - under CEO Andrew Demetriou - began to investigate expanding into the high-growth areas of Gold Coast and Western Sydney.
At the time, cash-strapped North Melbourne had agreed to play 10 matches on the Gold Coast in a bid to boost their bottom line. With the AFL keen to add a second team in Queensland, it fuelled speculation the Kangaroos would eventually relocate north - especially with a $100m carrot from the AFL dangling in front of them.
Behind the scenes, a group of Gold Coast businesspeople came together to help the AFL assess the landscape should North Melbourne, as expected, take the juicy relocation package and set up in Queensland.
Of course, they never did. James Brayshaw campaigned to ‘keep North at North' and the proud Kangaroos stayed put at Arden St.
The Roos' decision to turn their back on the move north came as a huge shock given the financial incentives, but the Queenslanders working behind the scenes quickly realised it was an extraordinary opportunity for the region, as Witheriff recalls.
“Everyone was waiting for the announcement [of North agreeing to the move] and to everyone's surprise - especially for Gill McLachlan (then deputy AFL CEO) - it turned out that North had voted it down and they weren't moving,” Witheriff says.
“We left the Northcliffe Surf Club in a state of shock.
“Gill grabbed Graeme Downie, who had not long retired as Chairman of the Brisbane Lions, and myself, and we went to a restaurant in Broad Beach and sat down. Gill said ‘we've got a problem' and I recall Greame saying to him ‘I don't think we have a problem, Gill – you have a problem'.
“Until that point, none of us had really thought about building a team from scratch. That was in late 2007; that's when the hard work really began.”
Witheriff, a Gold Coast local, quickly shook off the North Melbourne about-face and started laying the foundations for a standalone club.
“It was an opportunity I couldn't allow to slip. We needed to get a stadium built, and needed to ensure the organisation was sustainable for 50 years and not go the way that other sporting organisations had been before on the Gold Coast,” he said.
“It was a broader remit than just finding 18 players to win a Grand Final – if the team was gone within a few years, as had been the case with other sporting teams up here, the effort would've been for nothing. We had to build a sustainable club.”
As it happened, the ‘GC17' bid team secured the license to become the AFL's 17th club on March 31, 2009, with a two-year build before their debut AFL season in 2011.
The gradual build-up featured a year in the under-18 TAC Cup followed by a season in the VFL competition.
In launching the first new club since Fremantle 16 years previously, the AFL granted the Suns a juicy array of draft and salary cap assistance.
Initially, the Suns were given early access to sign twelve 17-year-olds from around the country for their VFL campaign, although few of these became stars - the best were probably Maverick Weller, Alex Keath, and Trent McKenzie.
The Suns also stunned the Australian sporting world by signing Brisbane Broncos star Karmichael Hunt, who switched codes to play for Gold Coast from 2010, and the best player of his generation at the time: Gary Ablett Junior.
Another seasoned recruit was Nathan Bock, the club's first uncontracted signing in 2010, who switched from the Adelaide Crows to the Suns amidst much controversy. While he looks back on his time at the Suns with fondness, he recalls the threadbare facilities being a huge handbrake when it came to trying to establish a high-performance culture.
“When you speak to the inaugural Suns players, we were told once the new stadium was built, our training facilities were going to be put in place too, so in our second season,” Bock said.
“But I spent the whole four years pretty much training out of substandard facilities. The gym was in a tin shed with no air conditioning – can you imagine how hard it is in the middle of summer, working out in a huge tin shed when it's incredibly hot and 100% humidity?
“And we were doing things like having ice baths in blow-up pools.
“I think the Suns didn't get those [updated] facilities for about six or seven years, so there would've been a heap of players who played their whole career training out of substandard facilities.”
Andrew Thomas, the club's first full-time employee as a business development executive, recalls an even scarier experience when the club's administration had to work out of demountable huts in the Suns' early years.
“Our ‘high-performance centre' was a hut out the back of the stadium,” he says. “I remember we had two snakes in the office during work hours and we had players grabbing pythons off our roofs on some occasions.
“It was tough going back then, when we had about 30-odd commercial, membership, and media staff housed in a really small hut.”
Those early hurdles certainly impacted preparations for their debut season, and unfortunately, the results reflected this - Gold Coast finished dead last with a 3-19 record and a percentage of just 56. Things didn't improve much in 2012, only avoiding a second consecutive wooden spoon thanks to GWS' arrival in 2012.
Nine times they have finished bottom four, with 12th being their best ladder position, achieved in 2014 and 2022.
Those at the club all admit the on-field results have been nothing short of a failure, but are hopeful, if not confident, that will soon change under the coaching of three-time Tiger premiership coach, Damien Hardwick.
But in judging the Suns on their first 13 years in the competition, it can't just be through an on-field lens.
The club says it has helped boost participation in junior and women's football in Queensland by 82% and has contributed an average of $38 million to the local economy per year.
Witheriff, who stepped down as Chairman in 2016, admits the Suns must start performing on the field, because that is how sporting teams are ultimately judged, but labels the Suns' off-field achievements and impact as “extraordinary”.
“It has been extraordinary,” he said.
“The sporting infrastructure that's been facilitated through the efforts of the Suns has changed the way people live on the Gold Coast – the magnitude of that can't be overlooked.
“Financially, in Year 2 I remember looking at the numbers and there were 63,000 interstate visitors that came up to [watch] the Suns, and that's now been going on for 13 years.
“The players themselves have been doing 5,000-plus hours of community service [each year] and have triggered a whole different mentality across sporting clubs in terms of how they contribute to the city.
“And if you look at the participation rates now, Queensland is one of the fastest-growing markets.
“So if you look at the participation rates and the [community] engagement and things like the media rights landscape, the impact has been nothing short of extraordinary.”
For the full story of how the Suns came to be, watch or listen to the AFL Team Builders podcast, which goes into further detail in areas such as:
- Why the Suns felt obliged to follow the AFL's objectives, whereas GWS were able to push the boundaries, to their benefit.
- How the Suns' colours and branding were settled on, with the club almost nicknamed the Stingrays or Ironmen.
- The experiences of Charlie Dixon, the club's first-ever signing as a local zone selection, before he moved to Port Adelaide after five seasons.
- The club's difficulties in trying to educate the public about the club and the sport.
- Further exploration of Gold Coast's impact on the local community and Queensland football landscape.
- Nathan Bock's recollection of why he decided to join the Suns.
