Shepherd, a lifelong Cats fan, said he supported the AFL’s plans for expansion in NSW before he was approached to lead the new club’s board.
But his talks with Harley, now a Team GWS consultant, gave him a crucial insight into the AFL’s vision.
“Apart from being a brilliant sportsman, he’s a charming, intelligent, articulate young man and I think he convinced me just what the AFL was seeking to achieve in the west of Sydney. I thought that was a very worthwhile set of goals,” Shepherd said on Friday.
As the inaugural chairman of Team GWS, Shepherd faces myriad challenges to ensure the club’s success from its 2012 debut.
He identified the appointment of a CEO and the negotiation of a stadium deal as key components but another more important task overshadowed those challenges.
“I think the first thing is to get really involved with the community - to get buy-in from the community of the west of Sydney,” he said.
“Obviously we’ve got to get the team set up properly, we’ve got to get a good board, a good CEO and get all those things going… but I think initially [we need] to just get established and become part of the fabric of the greater west.”
In the longer term, Shepherd agreed that achieving financial independence from the AFL would be Team GWS’s greatest hurdle.
“That is the $64,000 question. We don’t want to be on the AFL drip forever but it is a challenge,” he said.
“We haven’t got a definite time frame in mind but certainly one of our goals is to get independent as soon as we sensibly can.”
League CEO Andrew Demetriou said he was delighted with the results of the Team GWS project to date.
“If you had said to me 12 months ago that we would land Kevin Sheedy, Tom Harley, Graeme Allan, Grant Mayer and Andrew Hill from the NRL and now of course Tony Shepherd… and then if you told me we’d get 10,000 people going out to Blacktown to watch a NAB Cup game, I probably would have thought you were crazy,” he said.
Demetriou said Shepherd’s business experience as an executive in the road infrastructure industry made him an exceptional candidate for the job.
“At most successful football clubs, if you can get the chairman right, the CEO right and the coach right and get a strong leader, you’re halfway there,” Demetriou said.
“One of the most attractive things about Tony is that he’s been a builder of things over a long period of time, building tunnels that take 10 years of planning and so forth. Well, this football club is a 10-year project.
“It’s still a long haul; we’ll keep putting our best foot forward and we’ll make a few mistakes along the way, but so far I’ve just been delighted with the way [AFL NSW/ACT general manager] Dale [Holmes] and his team have gone about it.”
