It is hard to believe Curtis Scott has only played 20 NRL games.
The start to his career has been electrifying. He arrived in Melbourne at the end of 2015 and dove head first into the infamous Storm pre-season.
Not only did he past that test, he did so with flying colours – so much so that he earned his NRL debut in Round 2, 2016. A broken leg in Round 4 cut his debut season short but the promise was already there.
Fast track now two years on and the 20-year-old is a Storm Premiership player.
But how did Scott come to wear purple?
You have to take yourself back to Cronulla, during the early stages of the 2015 season. Scott was playing SG Ball (Under-18s) for the Sharks at the time and it was on this one particular night that the teenager first appeared on the Storm radar.
“I remember going to Shark Park to watch a couple of other kids,” Storm Recruitment Manager Paul Bunn said.
“Nobody had ever mentioned this Curtis Scott… I was going to watch three other players that I had been monitoring.
“Then I saw this big, rangy kid in the centres for Cronulla and he was so aggressive and competitive.
“You just knew that kid would do everything he possibly could to play NRL. You just looked at him and you knew he was a Melbourne Storm player.”
So then the wheels of motion began to turn, starting with a phone call to Scott’s manager Sam Ayoub.
However Bunn was not the only recruiter making that phone call, suddenly the interest came flooding in for the emerging talent.
It was made known to all interested parties that no offers would be entertained until after the Australian Schoolboy Championships in October later that year.
That news made Storm a little uneasy, thinking that would all but end their chances of luring Scott to Melbourne.
“Oh no, this is going to be the worst thing for us,” Bunn recalls thinking at the time.
“Now we will have to compete with everyone and there are clubs out there who will pay top dollar for a young kid.
Sure enough Scott dominated at the carnival, along with Scott Drinkwater who Storm would also sign by the end of the year.
The Club then set about getting to know Scott and his family as well as introducing them to the city of Melbourne.
“We knew we were going to have to work hard to get this kid to Melbourne, we knew we had a fight on our hands,” Bunn said.
“He visited a few other clubs but I think he knew that the system here would make him stronger, a better person and a better player. He knew deep down that this was the best place for him.”
Then around six months after Bunn first picked up the phone to enquire about Scott, it was this time his phone that rang the other way.
“Sam (his manager)rang me and I couldn’t believe it, all that hard work had paid off,” Bunn said.
“I was more pleased that I knew we had a first grader.
“His first year at our Club he played two NRL games as a 19-year-old centre. He was finely built but Craig said once we get him there and get him to be a first grader he will make it.
“Craig always had high hopes for him and knew that he would work hard to get there.”
Having now recently signed a deal to remain in Melbourne until at least the end of 2021, Scott is a key part of the new generation that will continue to excite Storm fans for many years to come.
