Frankston captain Josh Newman has left to coach Mornington in the MPNFL, Tom Murphy has joined Somerville full-time, Liam Hiscock signed with Edi-Asp and Bill Mackay is headed to Old Haileybury, while Sam Fletcher is undecided and might go travelling.
“I’ll tell you how I view that — opportunity,” Ryan said of the “outs”.
“People move on for all different reasons.
“Newie has gone to coach Mornington for a significant pay cheque that we can’t match. It’s something he wants to do, we fully support him, absolutely.
“So some people are saying they don’t want to play VFL anymore. It’s just simple choices.
“You can’t do much about it.
“And we know there’s a turnover every year anyway. You’ve just got to see it as opportunity for others to come in and changes to happen and see where you go.”
Frankston won six games for the second successive season under Ryan, looming as a finals hopeful before fading in the last month of the season.
Ryan said the Dolphins would target experienced players, “with AFL capabilities”.
“The players that we need to take us from six wins to 12 wins are men to start with because we’re very young,” he said.
“All stand alones will be all scrapping over the same (delisted AFL) players and we’ll all get one or two each I suppose.
“And at the moment they’re all freshly delisted so first off all they’re sour with the world, there’s no point talking to them, you just say ‘g’day’.
“The hard stuff happens in a month or so after the draft, they’re all hoping for that second chance. We just have to bide our time.”
Ryan said Frankston would also add new coaches and some new staff for the 2023 season.
“We’re already planning around next year, being bigger and better and trying to increase the fun capacity of it, just to make it a bit more enjoyable,” Ryan said.
“We want to try and get Friday night footy regularly if we can.
“We are really in a transition, it’s what I call growing pains.
“The club’s gone from winning one game to winning two games to winning six games and we won another six this year.
“All our indicators had us in the top 10 but we just didn’t get the wins. We had six losses by a goal or less, three of them post 32 minutes in the last quarter.
