The Townsville Blackhawks have made a fairy-tale start to their first season in the Queensland Cup rugby league competition.
The PNG Hunters kick off their 2015 campaign in March. Photo: SP PNG Hunters
But head coach Kristian Woolf believes they had it easy compared with the PNG Hunters.
Player and staff recruitment, sponsorship, marketing and developing a culture are among some of the challenges faced when starting a team from scratch.
And Woolf believes that, by comparison, they've been lucky.
"We obviously had a big task getting ourselves together for this year and I can only imagine that the PNG Hunters had an even bigger task last year: being a different country and stepping into a completely new competition, and just how you were going to make that work with players from different parts of a country, would have been a massive task. I think guys like Brad Tassell and Shane Morris and particularly the head coach Michael Marum - I've met him a few times and he's a guy I hold in really high regard - they've done an exceptional job."
The top of the table Blackhawks host the Hunters this afternoon at Jack Manski Oval.
