Hale signs on for three more years
David Hale will be a Kangaroo until the end of 2012 and Brent Harvey signs a new one-year deal
And skipper Brent Harvey has signed a new one-year deal with the club.
Hale was recruited from Broadbeach with pick No. 7 in the 2001 national draft and has become central to North's attack over the past 12 months.
Twenty-five this month and with 108 games' experience, Hale was considered a likely target for an offer to return to his native Queensland ahead of Gold Coast's AFL entry in 2011.
However, he said he had not been contacted by Gold Coast officials and had planned to stay with the Roos for the rest of his career anyway.
"Last year all I got asked about was, 'Are you going to the Gold Coast?' and all that sort of stuff with the team coming in," Hale said.
"It's good that the club and I could come to an agreement pretty early and put it into the background."
North also announced a new one-year deal for Harvey, who is sidelined for at least 10 weeks with an elbow injury.
"It is a fantastic sign of confidence that these boys have in our future as a football club," chief of football Donald McDonald said.
"We put an enormous amount of development into Haley over the journey.
"We just feel that he is a fabric player of our football club, a leader and one bloke who we are really rapt has committed to us for the next three years."
McDonald said Hale, Daniel Wells, Michael Firrito and Hamish McIntosh were part of a core group behind Harvey, Adam Simpson and Brady Rawlings – the most experienced trio on North's list.
Wells, Firrito, McIntosh, Rawlings, Drew Petrie, Daniel Pratt and Corey Jones completed a raft of public signings for the club in 2008 and McDonald said a list strategy was presented to the board at the end of the year.
"We've got a strong strategy in place and we know where we want to be in the next two to three years and this is just part of the process," he said.
"We're in constant contact with all the player managers and we'll just take them as they come.
"We're going to be a gun side in the future and we're confident about where we're heading."
Harvey said the club had showed enormous faith in him in the wake of his injury and that he was happy with one-year extensions – despite remaining the side's marquee player.
"Once you get to that big age of 30, they don't do too many big deals," he said.
"I just thought the contract they offered was good. I still think I've got another two or three really good years left in me."
McDonald added that draftee Jack Ziebell, the NAB AFL Rising Star nominee for round seven, was contracted by default until the end of 2010 but that the club was in no rush to extend that yet.
"He's just got to focus on preparing himself to be an AFL footballer. He's an exciting player and just the sort of bloke that we hope's with us for the next 10 years," he said.