Nick Rundle takes over as South West Queensland Thunder men’s head coach

The South West Queensland Thunder men’s team is set to embark on a new era with the announcement of Nick Rundle as the new head coach. See what he had to say after taking on the job and what to expect from the Thunder in 2025.

Nick Rundle pictured as coach of Willowburn in 2018.

 

A new era of football on the Darling Downs is here with Nick Rundle taking hold of the reigns as South West Queensland Thunder men’s coach.

The move was more than a decade in the making for Rundle, with his 12-year coaching career leading him to this point.

“(I am) pretty excited to get going after what was a pretty tough year last year,” he said.

“I am pretty keen to get involved with it.

“I started coaching 12 years ago, it is always something I wanted to do to get into coaching and being here in Toowoomba, really coaching Thunder men’s is the highest you can go.

“I always try and set my ambitions as high as I can and that’s what I’ve worked towards the last 12 years.”

Throughout his extensive coaching tenure, Rundle highlighted his time with Willowburn as a highlight, where he turned the club around from not having enough players for two teams, to having five senior men’s squads competing.

“The biggest highlight for me was the rebuilding of the Willowburn men’s team program, not so much the trophies that we won but the strength in product that the club became,” he said.

“When I was there, players wanted to come and play there and that was very different to when I started.

Willowburn coach Nick Rundle during the 2018 Toowoomba Football League Premier men grand final.

“That’s probably the one thing I look back and go ‘that’s probably my greatest achievement’.”

Rundle believes his experience rebuilding Willowburn will be vital for his task with the Thunder as the club looks to return to the heights of 2020 where it made the men’s grand final.

“Everyone wants to play football the best level they can, I think intrinsically that’s how we’re wired but sometimes I think here locally, players outside the Thunder program kind of feel isolated from it,” he said.

“So we’ve really spent a lot of time trying to draw that in.

“I think bringing in Mark Robinson who was at Willows last year doing their men’s program for the Brisbane team, that brings a bit of extra attraction in that people know him, people know me, they know what we’re about as coaches.

“We’ve seen massive spike I think in terms of the number of people who put in for trials to try and make the squad.

Nick Rundle

“We’ve really tried to make people feel like we want them there so then they will want to be there and from here it is trying to make the men’s program a place where guys want to come and play football.”

Rundle revealed what his major focus throughout this off-season has been as well as what to expect from a Rundle-coached Thunder outfit.

“My focus has mainly been trying to draw back some local experience,” he said.

“I have tried to target local players from around the mid 20s because that’s kinda what we lacked.

“We got great young players but not necessarily seasoned experienced players, that’s been a real focus in the off-season.

“My style is fairly aggressive with the ball and fairly structured without it, so probably a little bit different to what we saw last year.

“We are trying to make sure we are strong structurally in the defensive shape and then when we get the ball we want to be really aggressive when we go forward with it.”

The content summaries were created with the assistance of AI technology, then edited and approved for publication by an editor.