IN its campaign towards the New South Wales Ron Massey Cup tournament, the Kaiviti Silktails have brought on board a new high performance unit manager who arrived into the country last week.
Tom Watkins, who was previously part of the Parramatta Eels, will now be the new HPU manager for the Kaiviti Silktails helping coach Brandon Costin prepare a strong team for next year’s NSW Ron Massey Cup season.
Watkins said the talented league players in the country needed to be nurtured well into a professional rugby league environment.
“We have got plenty of raw talent in Fiji that probably have not been exposed to a professional environment like we are creating so a big focus of ours at the moment is just trying to make everything as professional as possible to get these boys up to scratch in term of their professional attitude towards everything they are doing,” said Watkins.
Watkins said Fiji should be proud of the abundance of raw talent found in local players.
“I think it is very exciting that we have plenty raw talent that with a bit of nurturing could turn into anything.
“I think everyone in Fiji should be excited about the prospect of some of these boys as we’ve seen such as Semi Radradra, Maika Sivo come out of this country and make a name for themselves in rugby leaguer so we certainly could have some of them here and it’s very exciting,” said Watkins.
“There’s nothing but positivity in store for this fantastic venture that is going to provide opportunities for local boys to really progress into the Bati squad and hopefully into bigger things like full-time professional athletes in Australia,” he added.
Watkins said the most important mission was to take the Silktails to win the Ron Massey Cup.
“In terms of our immediate focus, we want to go and win the Ron Massey in its first year and I think the players here are well trained and there is no reason why we couldn’t give it a real good crack.
Everyone is in this competition to win and that is going to be our focus,” he said.
