Kerr reveals a lot of the finer details surrounding the trade period in the long and in-depth chat which will be shown in three parts on lions.com.au later this week.
The Lions have been active traders since Kerr joined the Club in 2010, but he said that the 2013 trade period was arguably the busiest.
“Every trade period has been pretty busy, because the reality is we’ve been involved in some reasonably significant trading,” Kerr told LIONS TV.
“My first year here it was Jared Brennan, and that took a fair bit of time, then in my second year it was Mitch Clark.
“In terms of workload, (2013) was fairly intense. It was pretty much three weeks of talking to clubs, talking to people internally about our situation, trying to come up with strategies that might help us, and putting offers to clubs.
“It’s three very busy weeks and when you look at the outcome, it doesn’t quite equate to how much work goes into it.”
Kerr also reveals how the Club had been attempting to re-sign the five departing players from the beginning of the year.
“We’d had offers and had been talking to agents about those players from early in the year,” he said.
“We’d done a lot of work and had a lot of discussions. Even after they said they wanted to go home, Justin Leppitsch was appointed, and he sat down with each player and spoke with them about his game plan and where he saw them fitting in.
“But in the end, you can’t force a player to sign. We certainly did all we could to try and retain those players. I can honestly say there’s not much more we could have done.”
Kerr also goes into greater detail about how Hawthorn’s recruitment of Ben McEvoy from St Kilda threw a spanner in the Lions’ works, and how the Club attempted to lure Queenslander David Armitage from the Saints.
Kerr’s three-part trade interview will run from Wednesday till Friday exclusively on LIONS TV.
