Perth Bears Assistant Coach Ben Gardiner

**Mark Duffield** (0:00)
Welcome back to the SENWA studio. We're out here at Up to Stadium on this Tuesday morning in Perth. As I mentioned, it is cold outside at the moment, 9.1 degrees, but the sun is shining, so it will be warming up. It's certainly warming up at Perth Bears headquarters. They're getting ready to roll in 2027, and we are joined in the studio now by their assistant coach, Ben Gardiner. Ben, welcome.

**Ben Gardiner** (0:24)
Morning, thank you. Thank you for having me on.

**Mark Duffield** (0:26)
So are you based in Perth yet? You over here?

**Ben Gardiner** (0:28)
Not quite. I just bought a house in Ileuka, so around about three weeks ago.
It settles in a month, so a really exciting time for us. We'll be over here within the next month or so, so a really exciting time. Still lots going on on the East Coast, so around recruitment and all of those sorts of things. So that was a bit of the proviso to start with, but things are really heating up in terms of moving over here and getting into position and ready to start training a team.

**Mark Duffield** (0:57)
So when will training start for the 2027 season?

**Ben Gardiner** (1:00)
Well, it will start at the start of November, whether it's the first of November or somewhere in those first two weeks of November. It's funny how the NRL season starts. So what happens is some of the players can't come back until a later period of time based on the CBA rulings and all of that. So older players have longer time off, which they probably need. Younger players have some less time off, so we'll have a lot of younger players roll in first.
At the start, we'll probably have somewhere between 12 and 15 players, and then over coming weeks after that, we'll add three or four players on per week to get to our full squad.
Normally have 30 players in your full squad. We'll probably have 26 or 27 to start with and leave a few spots open. Some development players, so six or seven development players, they're young up and comers, obviously developers. And then you have some training replacement or training trial type players that come in for a training opportunity and hope to push into that NRL squad to fill those extra spaces. So you could end up with somewhere between 35 and 45 players in the squad. And that's what we'll plan to do. And I think to be able to have a squad that you can train with, you need to have at least 38 players to give or take injuries, to make sure you can do 13 versus 13, which is what we do in the rugby league game.

**Mark Duffield** (2:14)
So how far along are we at this stage? How many players signed at this stage?

**Ben Gardiner** (2:18)
Yeah, good question. We've got 21 out of the 30 signed at the moment out of the top 30 As I said, we'll try and get to about 27 So we've got about six, maybe seven to go.
Then we're in a position with a development list where we've got two out of possible five or sixes. So you can have seven in your development list, but our plan is to stay under that because obviously we've got these training replacement players that are ultimately competitive and trying to find a way into those top squads. So you give that competitiveness because it gives you a competitive edge around your training as well. So a couple of those guys would sneak into the development list. Maybe one of the development list guys can be upgraded into the top 30 And that's how you do it to keep it competitive. So keep a few spots available to be able to do that.

**Mark Duffield** (3:01)
So a couple of signings in the last week or so, Mason Barber, 20 year old, tell us about him.

**Ben Gardiner** (3:06)
So Mason has been playing up in the North Queensland Cowboys. He's a fullback or center, could probably play on the wing.
What we've tried to do with the recruitment is we've tried to recruit our top list and then some guys as backing or guys to build into the list over the next two or three years. So Mason is a fullback in rugby league. We talk about the spine players and the spine players are the halfback, the five-eight, the fullback and the hooker. So you want to have good spine players because the best teams in the competition win because they have the best spine players basically. So we've been able to build into our squad or our recruitment guys that are guys up and coming through that. Mason is definitely one of them. Played for Queensland under 19s, played in a lot of the rep teams coming through as a young guy. He's already played for the North Queensland Cowboys as a 20 year old. So he'll come to us building his way in to find his spot, probably as the number one fullback eventually, whether he will be at the start.