PORT Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley is fine with the club maintaining the status quo in 2014, but he's demanding his own reserves team in 2015.
On Thursday night the SANFL's directors voted 6-2 in favour of inviting the AFL clubs to field reserves teams in the competition next year.
Adelaide immediately accepted the league's offer, but the conditions don't suit Port Adelaide, who wants to maintain the Magpies' junior structure as well as have all non-selected AFL players line up for the SANFL side.
The Power will be the only club in the AFL without its own reserves team next season.
Hinkley said he was willing to keep things the way they are for another year to support the club's community.
"Right now, as it stands, we're happy to go with the status quo … but in 2015 we need to have our own team," Hinkley said.
"It's to support our team and our football community, that's what we're about, we're a community.
"If that means waiting for 12 months, we'll wait.
"We know that there's still some restrictions with that though and the ideal model would be that we're playing our players together in the one team."
Hinkley said he hadn't given much thought to how his own reserves team would be assembled in 2015 or in which league it would play.
The coach said such matters were for the club's administrators to sort out.
"I've got lots of things to do week to week at the moment and that's coaching the footy team, so I'll leave that to Keith (Thomas) and David (Koch) and the people who are running the club in those areas," he said.
"The major part of the idea that I have is that we maintain Port Adelaide together as best we possibly can."
Hinkley's immediate focus is on taking another step to securing what would be a remarkable finals berth by beating Gold Coast on Saturday.
The coach admitted his side had performed better than he anticipated this season, but refused to say it had 'overachieved'.
"We're not looking at overachieving, we're looking at no limits for this footy club and that's exactly what I expected from the start," he said.
"We weren't quite sure where we could go … together we've obviously done things pretty well to get to the point where we are now, but we want to just push – we don't want to stop now.
"Whenever [our last game] is, we'll be pushing as hard as we can to achieve as much as we can."
The Power will be without Dom Cassisi (hamstring) and John Butcher (hip) for Saturday's clash, while they dropped Kane Mitchell.
Defenders Campbell Heath and Tom Jonas return to the side as does small forward Cameron Hitchcock.
Butcher had registered just eight disposals over the past two weeks and kicked only one goal, but Hinkley said his hip injury had played a part in his poor form.
He hoped the 22-year-old forward would miss just a week or two, but admitted he could be sidelined for up to a month.
