Executive General Manager of Football Rob McCartney spoke on RSN on Wednesday morning, detailing the club’s pride in the development of the young group but also the realistic nature of the work that still needs to be done.

McCartney said while the recent run of form as been pleasing, the club is still sitting outside the eight and remain more focused on the week to week.

“Yes, we’re up and about but we’re still ninth so not even in the final eight, so can’t get too excited yet,” McCartney said.

Despite the 0-5 start to the 2024 season, McCartney said the Hawks firmly believe they are headed in the right direction with little wins along the way.

“We developed a strategic plan around building this list once Sam (Mitchell) was appointed as the senior coach. And as much as we were zip and five, we were still reasonably confident we were on the right track, we were getting games into young players,” he said.

“Admittedly we wanted to be performing better in terms of wins and losses, but we knew that this journey was going to take some time.

“We’ve recently seen (Changkuoth) Jiath, (Jack) Ginnivan, and (Connor) Macdonald get past 50, Meek get to 40 games and even players like Newcombe and Day get past 70, it’s so important to get games experience before you can actually get wins experience and we’re starting to get that.”

McCartney addressed that while the wins have been coming and the excitement is building, there’s still plenty to work on.

“What we would say is that we’re still pretty aware that to get to the pointy end there’s still a lot of work to do,” McCartney said.

“We have been reasonably pleased with the second half of this season obviously. But I think we still have an awareness that we’re a young side, I think we’re still the third youngest side in the competition and there’s still probably going to be a few more ups and downs before we get the real consistency that the best teams get.

“We’re happy that we’re seeing really strong development through the individuals, but more importantly we’re seeing a collective improvement of the team.

“I think there’s a genuine sense of excitement and I think we see that on game day, but we see that through the week as well.

“The group has an understanding that if we keep winning then there’s an opportunity that we’ll definitely play finals and if we lose games there’s probably a strong chance that we won’t.

“So putting our playing group into games, even the last couple of weeks, not even this one coming up. But you talk about the Collingwood game and even the Adelaide game, they were games that if we had of dropped either of those two games, we’re making it tough for ourselves to play finals this year.

“So putting our young group into games that count is absolutely a great part of the development of the group that we have right now.

“While we might or might not play finals, these have had the same draw card to them if you win, you keep going and if you don’t, you’ll finish early.

“So we’ve been really happy that we’ve been in games like this. GWS are a really good side and yes, we did beat them down in Tassie a few weeks ago but we get them at Canberra and we’ve been there once and won in the snow and they’ve played there a few times so don’t know who’s got the advantage there.”