Wahgunyah president Darryl Hore thrilled with response to the club's player shortage plight

Lions president Darryl Hore told The Border Mail last week the club was on the verge of going into recess unless numbers increased significantly and his message has hit home in a big way.

"The response from the community and from other clubs in the TDFL has been fantastic," Hore said.

"It's incredible and it's good to know there's people out there who are wanting us to fight on.

"It's been heartwarming but we're still a way off, there's no two ways about it.

"We've done the easy stuff and the hard work begins now."

A large number of players committed to the club this week but more are still needed if the Lions are to take to the field for their round one clash with Wodonga Saints on April 2.

"We've got players that are coming back to the club and there's a range of reasons they're giving, like 'no-one spoke to us,'" Hore said.

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"We've got two blokes that finished their football seven years ago but they've come down and said 'we read the piece in the paper and we can't see that happen' and they've been doing some training.

"They said 'we're only reserves players but we're numbers.'

"We've had some new players come to the club, which is excellent, and there are some players from Melbourne that have contacted us, which is even better.

"The response has been outstanding and if we can get the same sort of response in relation to the netball side of things, we're probably 80/20 at the minute on the positive side."

The events of the last few days have underlined how much sporting clubs matter to their communities.

"I had a phone call from another club in the TDFL this morning and they said 'anything we can do, let us know,'" Hore said.

"One thing Wahgunyah does is we bring good gates. Every time we go to an away club, we're probably worth $5000-$7000 in terms of the canteen and the bar.

"If we don't go, there's nine away games clubs are going to miss out on so at six grand, there's $54,000 not going back into the community."

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