PORT ADELAIDE senior coach Ken Hinkley has implored the members and supporters to stick with the young and exciting group the club is building.

Hinkley was full of praise for the development of the young brigade, both for the Power and the Magpies.

“We know we are in a good position in terms of what the future holds,” Hinkley said at Port Adelaide’s Best and Fairest at the Convention Centre on Friday night.

“We have some drafting to come again soon to add some more young people to our group.

“The obvious ones were the three young boys who we drafted, and what fantastic years they had, but we’ve seen Willem (Drew) up here. We’ve seen Pete Ladhams. We’ve seen Joel Garner play games.

“We’ve just seen so many players at the club improve over the course of the season, and we’ve seen that in the Magpies. 

“The youth of our football club have all shown great improvement.”

Hinkley admitted the club had to make some really difficult decisions at the end of last season, which left an air of uncertainty heading into season 2019.

“We talked about some of the decisions we were going to make, and some of the brave decisions we had to make if we were going progress and go forward as a footy club,” he said.

“That left us with some uncertainty, there’s no doubt about that. We knew we were going to be able to bring in some high-quality young players.

“We knew the that the group we had here already was pretty special. We set out at the start of the year with some hope and some optimism about what we may have been able to achieve.”

The senior coach said with the injection of youth into the club, there would be moments of inconsistency, but his belief in long term plan was strong.

“This season played out the way we thought it may at times,” Hinkley said.

“We had some ups and downs and unfortunately, we had one too many downs.

“We aren’t here just to play finals. We are here to win premierships. That’s one of our challenges to set this side up to win premierships.”

The 53-year-old said the ambition of Port Adelaide was to set a team up to win premierships.

“We’ve got a lot of optimism about our footy club,” Hinkley said.

“We aren’t here to just play finals. We want to win the grand final. Every year you are envious of the team that wins it.

“This year it was Richmond. We’ve seen them not that long ago be very similar to Port Adelaide.

“We get it, it’s part of the journey. We need to continue to grow and get better.”