“IF you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, is said to have adopted this as his life motto and while we can safely assume he wasn’t talking about the state of bush football in Australia when he first spoke the words, it is an attitude worth adopting when considering mergers between country clubs.
The committees of the Walla and Rand-Walbundrie ought to be congratulated for taking a proactive approach to the future of their football-netball clubs.
It’s easy to get hung up on past glories and forget about the future.
Walla is the Hume league’s most successful club with 15 premierships to its name and Rand-Walbundrie played off in a senior grand final just 18 months ago.
But the Hoppers have won just 15 matches in the past five years and are facing a serious battle to field a senior team, let alone reserves, in the 2016 competition.
Rand-Walbundrie, like Walla, has identified the need for a strong junior base for a strong club.
Mergers are nothing to be feared. In fact, quite the opposite, they should be encouraged.
I’ve seen how well they can work first-hand.
My first football club was the Daysdale Magpies, which later became the Coreen-Daysdale Saints and is now known as the Coreen-Daysdale-Hopefield-Buraja United Power.
The name might be quite a mouthful, and a source of amusement for some rival supporters, but the experience has been nothing but positive.
Sure, it doesn’t always guarantee on-field success, but it means more people are involved in the club and as the saying goes, many hands make light work.
Country communities are getting smaller and it’s harder for clubs to find volunteers, be it in the canteen, the scoreboard, to run the boundary or sell raffle tickets. The list goes on.
A well-placed football source said to me last week, “why would you want to be a footy club president these days when you have to raise $200,000 with no guarantees of success?”
A Border Mail poll, which has attracted 300 votes, shows 37 per cent of respondents oppose the Hoppers merging with the Tigers.
It’s clear that some think it would be a tragedy for Walla to not exist in its own right in the Hume league.
The real tragedy would be if it didn’t exist at all.
