Ricky StuartCredit: Canberra Raiders
The bus has just left the Canberra Raiders’ team hotel in Las Vegas when skipper Joey Tapine makes his way to the front.
“We have to go back,” he says to the staff. “I’ve left my boots.”
Stuart, sitting at the very front of the bus, yells across to the club’s data analyst.
“Has he got his GPS on? That’s going to stuff with your numbers,” he says jokingly, in reference to the extra miles going into the captain’s legs as he searches for his footwear around the mammoth Resorts World facility.
Some 10 minutes later, Tapine walks back on to the bus empty-handed. Turn out his boots were under his seat all along. Welcome to the inner sanctum of the Canberra Raiders.
As Stuart addresses the team inside one of Resorts World’s many conference rooms that has been transformed into the Raiders’ team room for the week, the passion the coach has for the club becomes obvious.
“I guarantee you, they don’t do this at other clubs,” Stuart says to his players the morning after a $110,000 function put on by the club for the players, their families and the Raiders’ corporate partners. “This place is special.”
Raiders coach Ricky Stuart addresses his players in Las Vegas.Credit: Canberra Raiders
It was a good circuit-breaker after several days of drama that followed the news Raiders duo Hudson Young and Morgan Smithies had been involved in a late-night altercation at the team hotel in Las Vegas after one of the players was left stranded without a room due to a system malfunction.
Stuart has long thrived on a siege mentality. A frame of mind that reflects his often heightened emotional state. The highs are high, the lows are as you see them in press conferences.
A raider, by definition, is a person who attacks an enemy in the enemy’s territory.
Stuart is in his element as he tries to ignite the flame in his players. The passion is undeniable. But it’s that same passion that recently forced him to change his ways.
About three years ago, several senior players approached the coach about how his inability to handle losses was negatively affecting his players.
“I probably didn’t realise the effect I was having on a number of my players in regards to not being able to handle losing,” Stuart says.
“And it wasn’t until guys like Joe [Tapine], Papa [Josh Papalii], Elliot Whitehead and Jordie Rapana – those boys who obviously I very much trust – spoke to me about it, [that] I could see that it was probably hurting them. It was affecting those boys, affecting the team and affecting me.
Ricky Stuart’s passion for the Raiders is undeniable.Credit: Getty
“That’s the relationship we’ve got here at the club with players and coaches. We tell each other how it is. We try to help each other. I don’t like being around people when we lose because I know I’m cranky. I bring the atmosphere and environment down.
“So I stay away. I stay away from my mates, I won’t go and have a beer with them. I stay away for a couple of days because I don’t want to bring anybody else into it now.”
Having been invited to spend several days with the Raiders in Las Vegas, the Herald gained a rare insight into a man whose reputation outside the club is far different to the one within it.
To the public – at least those who don’t support Canberra – Stuart is often criticised as a whinger, for not accepting defeat.
Stuart sees it differently. The post-match outbursts, in his eyes, merely reflect the passion he has for the club he has called home for almost a quarter of a century as a player and coach.
“I get annoyed with certain parts of the public because they don’t know me personally,” Stuart says.
“You talk about whinging, but is it just complaining about something that we’re not getting a fair go with? I’ve got to say what I feel in regards to putting my club out in front.
“If that’s me getting in the headlines and everybody else thinks, ‘Oh, he’s whinging again’, I couldn’t care because I’ve got to put my club first before what people think of me. And fortunately now with Peter [V’landys] and Andrew [Abdo] there, we do get listened to.”
Expectations of the Raiders in season 2025 are low. Some would suggest wooden-spoon low. That kind of talk is music to Stuart’s ears.
He has built a career out of convincing teams the world is against them, using it as fuel to burn the fire of his team.
This year, his team is a young one. Plenty of talent and potential, but not a lot of experience compared to some of the more fancied sides in the competition.
Josh Papalii and new Raiders captain Joseph Tapine train with the team.Credit: Getty Images
“It’s probably a football team that’s given me the most energy in coaching,” he explains. “I’ve enjoyed my coaching over the last two years as much as I ever have.”
Sitting in on the team meeting, you can sense that inexperience. Jamal Fogarty regularly pipes up, as you’d expect from the halfback. So too, Zac Hosking.
But Stuart knows which buttons to push, often stopping in conversation to bring his new skipper, Tapine, into the chat.
“That’s teaching,” he says. “That’s coaching. Whilst I’m coaching, I’m still teaching them to be senior players. He’s my first-year captain.
“In that type of process, when I’m saying, ‘Joe, what do you think?’ or I’m asking another young bloke to give me their opinion, they can always feel safe in that area because they’re never going to get criticism in regard to what they say.
“We make them feel comfortable in that regard, but I’m still teaching these players how to become strong role models, leaders, in our meetings. For the way I coach, I have to have the player trust me. If the player doesn’t trust me, it doesn’t work. I have to trust them, and they trust me.”
Ricky Stuart is interviewed in Vegas.Credit: Getty Images
While losses bring out the worst in Stuart, he possesses a genuine compassion that highlights why his players adore him.
He has always been a player’s player, who places an emphasis on friendship over coaching. But as Stuart has matured as a coach, his softer side has become more apparent.
“You have to be a lot more sensitive today,” he says. “The way I coached when I first started at the Roosters to today is completely 180 degrees. You’ve got to move with the generational change, and I think it’s much better.
“I think my three children have matured me and mellowed me into that type of coach. Any coach coaching the way they coached 20 years ago is not going to be able to do it today. Today, I do a lot more communicating with my senior players.”
The Raiders often talk about the cycle of truth. It’s the mantra behind their campaign. A list of what is expected from the players when they step on to a rugby league field.
“It’s not about being true to anyone else,” he says to his players as they prepare for their most intense training session of the week.
“I don’t give a stuff about the commentators or anyone outside this room, it’s about being true to your teammates.”
Caught up in the notion of truths, this columnist worked up the courage to ask Stuart about the widely held view that he had been given more chances at Canberra than most other coaches without a premiership have been afforded elsewhere.
The Raiders are a club that doesn’t rush to the conclusion that defeats are always a result of coaching and prefer to rebuild rather than hire and fire at will.
They have shown enormous faith in Stuart to end their premiership drought as he embarks on another rebuild in the nation’s capital.
“That makes me want to win more,” he says. “If I find I get to a situation at this club that I can’t do, I won’t need a tap on the shoulder. The club comes first.”
The Herald’s travel expenses to Las Vegas have been partly funded by the NRL.
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