“A freak thing”: Rugby league legend Mick Cronin on Gerringong’s success as a rugby league nursery
Tallon Smith
These days, barely a round goes by in the National Rugby League without a television or radio commentator mentioning the small South Coast town of Gerringong.
Home to just a tick over 4,000 people, the town has had an incredible ability to produce elite rugby league players, with eight locals playing in the national competition, meaning one in every 500 Gerringong locals is an NRL player.
Add to that another half dozen players in the lower grades, and it becomes clear that the town is an almost magical rugby league nursery unmatched anywhere in the country.
The town’s most famous export, Parramatta legend and NRL Hall of Famer Michael Cronin OAM, was among the first wave of Gerringong locals to make it big in the sport, followed by players such as Ron Quinn, Rod Wishart and the Sims siblings.
The owner of the local pub, Cronin’s Hotel Motel, the New South Wales and Australian representative has been a central figure in the town’s rise to rugby league folklore, coaching the club on two occasions and serving as a source of wisdom and inspiration for any local player wanting to have a crack at the big time.
In an interview with Battlers For Bush Footy, ‘The Crow’, as he is affectionately known, said it is “hard to explain” why the town has produced so many top-level footballers.
“It’s probably a freak thing,” he said.
“Going back to my time there were a couple of other blokes when I went to Sydney that travelled up with me, blokes like Peter Ford, Ronny Quinn and Russell Ford travelled up for one year.
“There’s seven out of one under 18s side in the NRL this year, they all turn 22 this year, four of them have played first grade.
“Then there’s the blokes like [Reuben] Garrick and Tyran Wishart and Jackson Ford that have been up there longer, and another bloke called Hayden Buchanan who’s had a few first grade games last year.
“But look, you’ve got to be lucky in some ways, every club’s trying to do the same thing.
“They’ve been very lucky in Gerringong where the place has been well run and they’ve got the right people in charge.
“You don’t always get it right, but they’re pretty conscious about the people they put in charge of their football sides.”
Gerringong is not unique in that there are a number of other towns across the state which have churned out a large quantity of NRL players relative to population size, including Temora, which had three locally-born players in the NSW Blues’ 2024 Origin squad, as well as Tingha, West Wyalong, Griffith and Cherbourg.
However, no place has been as consistent and fruitful for NRL scouts as the small South Coast town.
One possible explanation Cronin offered for Gerringong’s status as a prolific player nursery is its simultaneous small town club culture and proximity to pathways systems in Wollongong and Sydney.
“If you’re a young footballer in Group 7, and you’ve got aspirations to go further, Illawarra’s only up the road and that’s where most of them train for their junior rep stuff, they haven’t got far to travel,” he said.
“If you’re keen, it’s not like you’re coming from the back of Bourke to come to Sydney, you can live with your family, which I think is important in a lot of ways.
“[You can] stay with your family, you keep grounded, you’re happy, living with all your mates, and travel up to Wollongong.
“So that’s the one benefit in Group 7, if they’ve got aspirations to go further they haven’t got to travel far, they can live at home for a little bit longer.”
Another point of difference offered by this geographical blessing is the opportunity for players to play grade football for the Lions while in NRL systems, something that the club encourages.
Cronin said that the experience gained from playing against men in open age competition offers local prodigies a distinct advantage compared to their peers. “I think it definitely benefits them, they’re playing against men,” he said.
“When they get into first grade they’re playing against men, otherwise they’re playing through all those junior reps, they’re always playing against people their own age, and I sometimes think they take them up into that system too early.
“I’ve seen some blokes here not qualify for those rep games and have a year of first grade while they’re 18 or 19, and the next year they’re in the under 20s, because they’re just playing against men and their ability stands out.
“It was different when I was playing, because when were 17 and 18 there was no under 18s, if we didn’t play first grade we didn’t get a game, so that’s how much it’s changed in Gerringong over the years, as I said when I first came into play there was only one side, so if you didn’t make it you weren’t playing.”
A Culture of Giving Back
One man who can take some credit in the rise of some of the more recent local NRL debutants is current first grade coach Scott Stewart, the father of Dragons lock Hamish.
Cronin said that Stewart, who coached the club to back-to-back Group 7 titles in 2023 and 2024, has been instrumental in creating an environment where players are prepared to train year-round to better their game.
“In the last period of time, Scott Stewart has been very good for getting all those young blokes training, but they’ve still got to turn up and they’re prepared to do it,” he said.
“They could have 20 up there or more training over Christmas, and he’s got to take a lot of credit for that.
“It’s not just in the off season, you’ll see now during the year, blokes like Hamish Stewart, there could be four or five of them, they’ll train with their clubs, they’ll be here Thursday night with Gerringong, up at training sometimes helping them blokes train up there, and then they’ll come back here after and have something to eat with the players.
“That’s not just during the summer, that’s all year round.”
The Era of the South Coast Kangaroo
Looking back on his NSWRL career by the numbers, Cronin amassed a remarkable resume across 10 seasons with Parramatta, scoring 1,971 points in 216 premiership games, and featuring in each of the Eels’ four premiership victories to date.
However, these statistics ignore his previous eight-season stint with Gerringong in Group 7, where he played in five grand finals, winning two premierships in 1970 and 1972.
It was during this time that Cronin was one of the last players to achieve a unique honour, representing Australia from a Country Rugby League competition, playing 13 of his 35 tests for Australia during his Group 7 career.
Cronin said that while such a thing is completely unheard of in the modern professional game, it was quite commonplace at the time, with Steve Morris the last to receive the honour while playing at Dapto in 1978.
“I think Slippery Morris might have been close to the last,” he said.
“The first one to play for Australia from Gerringong in rugby league was a bloke named Paul Quinn who went away in the 1963 Kangaroo tour.
“His is an interesting story because he probably played his first game for Gerringong in first grade in 1953 as a halfback, [and] 10 years later he’s going away on a Kangaroo tour as a front rower, and then comes back and goes to Sydney for four years and captains Newtown.
“Then in 1966-1967 a bloke called Tony Branson did it from Nowra, still playing in the country, got picked, and then of course when he came back from the Kangaroo tour he went and played [in Sydney].”
The practice was so common back then in fact, that Cronin said he wasn’t the only player from the region in the team when he was first selected.
“Tthe year I first got picked a bloke called David Waite got picked from Western Suburbs in Wollongong,” he said.
“While he had a Sydney background, his first senior football was played with Wests in Wollongong, so there were other stories of it happening.”
The Secret to the Lions’ Success
Aside from its NRL exports, much has been made over the years of Gerringong’s success in the local Group 7 competition, where the club has won a record 22 premierships.
That success has grown even greater in recent times, with the club winning seven premierships in the last 16 completed seasons, almost one every two years.
When asked about the Lions’ status as the region’s top team of the past 20 years, Cronin was quick to point out the club’s extended success, as well as the fact that there have been plenty of tough periods for the modern powerhouse.
“You can say two decades, you can say 100 years, as I said they’ve won 25 comps, so that hasn’t just started,” he said.
“They have their lean times, like there was times mentioned when ‘we’ve got to amalgamate with someone else [in] bad times’, but they’ve survived all that, and they said ‘oh no, we’ll go alone’.
“You’ve got to have a bit of luck, but I think in my time even just as a kid watching, they’ve always had good people in charge, and always seemed to be able to produce a few footballers which is very handy.”
When asked why the town has always managed to put competitive sides on the field despite being smaller than many of its neighbours, Cronin said Gerringong’s love of rugby league is the only real answer.
“I probably can’t really answer that, they haven’t just got strong, they’ve been winning premierships since 1914, and it always has been a rugby league town,” he said/
“People played it and over all those years they’ve always had plenty of success, why that happened I don’t know.
“In my time here the club’s always been well run, and don’t worry there have been plenty of lean times, but it is a place where rugby league is probably one of the big talking points of the town.”
“Why [we’re] successful you don’t know, but I do know over the last period of time with both juniors and seniors, there’s been good people running the club, and usually if you’ve got the right people running it, you’ll have success in some way.”