Brumbies coach Jake White may use a trip home as an opportunity to recruit a South African player to add to his promising Super Rugby squad.

The Canberra-based franchise headed the Australian conference for almost the whole season, only to finish second behind Queensland following a final-round loss.

South African White won many plaudits for fashioning a competitive side out of largely unheralded players, some of whom went on to play for Australia in June.

With virtually all of his squad re-signed for next season, White is looking to possibly supplement home talent with a South African recruit.

“I think with Australia going into the World Cup in three years time, a development player who I feel could be good enough to play for the Wallabies in three years time, would be a great signing for us,” White told AAP at Thursday’s Super Rugby awards in Sydney.

“My first year I deliberately didn’t go out and try and head hunt anybody because I wanted to see what talent there was available in my own squad.

“Now that I know what we have and what maybe we need and what would give us a point of difference, I can go back now and have the luxury of trying to find the right guy that will take us to another step, because next year we won’t be under the radar.

“This year we probably got fortunate that people underestimated us and underrated us.”

White sees greater physicality at the breakdown and better tackling as areas he wants to improve.

“We’ll finish off the year on Monday with our team and individual reviews and just go through what we think we need to work on for the next six months,” White said.

“I don’t believe there was anything wrong with the effort and the ethos but we obviously got a bit bashed in certain games.

“We’ve got a relatively young group of players, not only in age, but also in experience.”

White says Colby Faingaa has the opportunity to step up and claim the openside flanker spot vacated by Michael Hooper’s move to NSW.