How Dean Young went from legendary player to Dragons coach, background, Wayne Bennett

St George Illawarra have finally made their call on the head coaching job. Frankly, it shouldn’t have taken them so long.

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When Dean Young retired as a player, Wayne Bennett, already a seven-time premiership-winning coach with over 600 first-grade games under his belt, called up the press personally to deliver a tribute that stops you in your tracks:

“Dean Young was my inspiration. In any of those I’ve ever coached, if they said who do you want on personality alone, this guy is in the grand final because he was the real deal. As a coach, you can’t let him down because Dean Young never found an excuse in his life. The doctor told him he’d never play again after that knee operation, but excuses aren’t a part of his genetic makeup. They just don’t exist in Dean’s life. He couldn’t train until Saturday, and could only do the last 15 or 20 minutes, but he always came in upbeat. I’d say, ‘You look like you’re doing it tough today?’ And he’d say, ‘I could be out there working on that building site, and I’m here playing footy with my mates, doing what I love.’ We haven’t heard the last of Dean Young, because one day we’ll all be calling him coach.”

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An interim coach is usually a man auditioning for his life, desperate to stack the side with safe options just to keep the scoreboard from looking like a car crash. But respectable losses don’t build a club, at least not one worth supporting, and keeping things respectable was never on Dean Young’s priority list.

His first move was to cut ties with fellow assistant Mick Ennis. Straight away, looking from the outside in, you thought: whoa, that’s ballsy.

The fans in the stands aren’t stupid. They’ve swallowed five years of hollow rebuild stories and band-aid fixes, and they’re done with the sugar-coating. Young made an all-or-nothing call that the long road back didn’t start in 2027 when the high-priced recruits arrive; it started right now. He threw local kids like the Couchman brothers, Dylan Egan, Hamish Stewart and Lyhkan King-Togia into the deep end, knowing the scars earned in these remaining rounds would give the club a proper head start. He did it fully aware that taking the hit on the scoreboard now might cost him the chance at landing the top job full-time. He chose club first, like he did as a player.

That kind of backbone shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows where Dean comes from.

His father, Craig “Albert” Young, was a police detective, a front-rower who captained St George and Australia, coached the side, and later sat on the board.

The moment Dean was appointed, Albert immediately stepped aside from his board role. He didn’t want a chance keyboard experts or bloggers could whisper that his son was getting looked after through nepotism. He cleared the deck completely so Dean stood on his own two feet. Every dad gets that.

When he retired, he took on the Dragons’ under-20s side alongside his 2010 premiership captain and mate, Ben Hornby. That 2014 team had blokes like Jack Bird and Addin Fonua-Blake coming through, and the two of them set about teaching those kids what it took to play first grade.

When the Dragons’ top job eventually came up years later, Young and Hornby were the two main candidates left in the frame. Having witnessed that friendship dynamic up close in the past: both blokes would have wanted the job, but if either lost out to his mate, so be it. Just two blokes who care about the club.

Young eventually packed up and headed to Townsville as an assistant under Todd Payten at the Cowboys. Up north, nobody cared about the Red V history; he had to prove he knew his stuff on coaching merit alone.

He earned the respect of that Cowboys roster, including Scott Drinkwater. When Drinkwater signed his deal to join the Dragons, he made no secret of the fact that Young was a big reason he decided to come south:

“Youngy’s picking players who are defensive effort-based players… He’s a great coach and I hope he gets the job. He understands different players and how they need to be approached. He’s a good dude, hard, and a good communicator. He’s got every trait.”

Drinkwater didn’t sign for the scenery; he signed because he knew Young was a coach who expects effort.

The Dragons got back in the winner’s circle with a solid win over the Tigers in round 18, followed by the bye and a tight loss to the Warriors across the ditch. That brings us to Sunday’s 2pm clash with the Titans at Jubilee. Both Young and Josh Hannay are coaching for the here-and-now with a firm eye on what comes next, and both squads boast plenty of young talent on the rise. Gold Coast come in with form on their side, but expect St George Illawarra to be buzzing on the back of Young’s appointment being locked in.

The wooden spoon is exactly where the next chapter of the Dragons narrative begins. The ladder, the losses, are all there to see. But the most important part of the story will be what comes next.

When recruits like Scott Drinkwater, Keaon Koloamatangi, and Connor Watson walk through the doors next February, they won’t be walking into a room of wide-eyed rookies. They’ll be walking into a dressing room full of young blokes who spent three months getting bashed in the middle of the field and learning what this level demands.

The ink on Dean Young’s contract is dry. Now he, his players, and the club have the chance to write their own story: one built purely on hard work, defensive effort, and zero excuses.