Nangwarry Saints upbeat despite 58 game, four-year losing streak
IT should be enough to drive a saint mad but this SA footy club is looking on the brightside, even if their 58 game losing streak is making the team song a bit hard to remember.
SA News
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AIDAN Mills remembers singing the Saints’ victory song like it was yesterday.
Except, it wasn’t yesterday. Or the Saturday before. Or even any Saturday last year.
Nope, the last time Mills or any other A Grade player for Nangwarry Football Club joined that traditional winter weekend chorus by belting out their winning battle cry was almost four years ago.
“Yeah, against Robe at Robe. It was a pretty good feeling,” the Saints full back grins.
“I reckon we’d gone two years without a win back then, too. We had a good team but the game plan wasn’t quite working and I remember that day we sort of didn’t listen to the (former) coach and just went down the line, kept it simple — and it worked.
“But with all the new faces around here now, most of the boys have probably never even sung the song.
“There’s maybe only five or six of us here who have.”
This is the ballad of the “Nanga” Saints — in all of its sometimes painful, yet bravely defiant glory.
In a stretch understood to be the longest active losing sequence in SA country footy, Mid South Eastern Football League battler Nangwarry has been on the wrong end of the scoreboard in each of its past 58 games.
Adding to the frustration, their average losing margin in that time is a whopping 195 points — 32 goals a week, give or take.
There’s been three 50-goal losses, including a 340-point belting last year, and once, against Mount Burr in 2015, Nangwarry failed to post a single behind in a 217-point defeat.
“But even people from the other clubs tell us, ‘That scoreboard doesn’t reflect the effort’,” Saints president Shane Ploenges says.
“You’d think 40-odd goals to one, they’re cruising. But it’s not like that; they have to work to get their goals.”
Twenty minutes north of Mt Gambier in the state’s South East, the township of Nangwarry is a speck on the Riddoch Highway — “The Heart of the Forest”, as it’s proudly declared on the welcome sign.
One of many small towns built on the region’s timber industry, this highway hamlet — population 500 — relied for decades on the work offered by the plywood mill on the community’s southern fringe.
But across 2009 and 2010 the mill was drastically wound down and 220 jobs were slashed from the operation.
It is no small coincidence that Nangwarry’s footy joy started drying up about the same time.
It’s a complex predicament that echoes with varying ferocity in towns and sporting leagues across the state. It spans the immediate concern of nearby employment and the changing social fabric of a community.
It involves the increasing pull of young adults away from regions to cities and grassroot sport’s fight to retain the interest of youngsters. And, common to every bush league, it is intensified by the cash game central to player recruitment and retention.
“For us, I put it down to the fact that in the last few years we lost some players and didn’t replace them,” Mills says.
“You get new players in, but you’re going from a bloke who’s played inter-league in Western Border or Mid South East and replacing him with people that aren’t quite that calibre.
“We can’t offer anyone jobs, and that’s a big one. Port Mac and Kongerong (rival teams), they’ve got the fishermen, other clubs have farmers; whereas here, the mill went down, big-time.
“Blokes say ‘I’ll come and play if you can get me a job’. We’ll try, but …”
The Saints launched as a football club in 1965 but it wasn’t until 1989 that they first tasted the thrill of playing finals football.
In what became a golden age for the club, Nangwarry emerged as a powerhouse through the 1990s, winning back-to-back premierships in 1993-94, and claiming two more flags in 1997 and 1999.
A core of local lads who graduated from senior colts to A Grade helped lift the club to heights previously unseen, bound by community, mateship and success.
There are no AFL/VFL or SANFL household names to have come out of Nangwarry — none that anyone braving the cold and fog at Thursday night training this week can remember, anyway.
“But the amount that could’ve played League footy,” Ploenges says. “Except, they never wanted to leave town.”
One of those stalwarts, and Nangwarry’s own slice of club royalty, is premiership player from the 90s dream era, Trevor Fenn.
A banner still hangs inside the clubrooms celebrating his 400th A Grade game. As of today, barely a week after his 50th birthday, Fenn’s club count stands at 508 games — a record that grows with the shortage of available numbers in the club’s B Grade team.
“These blokes, I take my hat off to them,” Fenn says.
“It’s not easy, coming out to training on a Tuesday and a Thursday night, then going out and play on a Saturday. There’s no doubt it would be going through their minds, ‘Wonder how much we get done by today?’, or ‘Are we going to kick a goal today?’.
“There must be a lot of doubt goes through their mind before they even run out. But they keep running out.
“I keep thinking, ‘the wheel will turn’.”
Sadly, the Mid South Eastern league is no stranger to clubs struggling on the field.
In 2005 Nangwarry’s neighbouring timber town, Tarpeena, was forced to close its doors as a football club after almost 60 years in the competition.
Tarpeena’s bleak record, which coincided with Nangwarry’s period of domination from 1993, included a winless run that stretched to seven seasons — anywhere from 123 games to upwards of 150, depending on who’s telling the story.
But for Ploenges, the Saints’ lopsided scoreboards are no indication that Nangwarry is spiralling towards a similar demise.
“Everyone thinks ‘Oh, they’re getting flogged’, but the atmosphere in the club is still good,” he says.
“At some clubs, everyone bickers. But here, if you’re the worst B Grader or the best A Grader, you can go into the bar and those two blokes can stand there and have a beer.
“The reality is that a lot of our blokes probably wouldn’t get an A Grade game at other clubs. But at least we’re giving these blokes somewhere to play, and giving the kids somewhere to play.”
Near the southern edge of Nangwarry’s footy ground sits the club’s netball courts, where the Saints’ women have also faced recent difficulties.
Teresa Stewart serves as president of the netball club, and also plays A Grade. Her partner, Vesa Virtanen, plays B Grade footy while eldest son Archer plays junior colts.
“I’m born and bred Nangwarry, so I would never have gone anywhere else,” Stewart says.
“It is like a family, and you all play on the same day — netball, football, junior football. So you do a shift in the canteen, you umpire, you play, everything. Everyone knows everyone and we all help out.
“But the question has come up for my kids, ‘Are they better off here or is it better to take them elsewhere?’. And I do question it at times, but as long as Nangwarry is here my kids will play here.”
Serious talks are set to start with coach David Stratman as early as this week to extend his tenure beyond a second year in charge of the Saints.
Those who’ve lived through the highs and lows reckon with Stratman at the helm there’s just enough junior talent coming through to give fresh hope and, in the coming years, the tide might turn once again for Nangwarry.
“Like everything, you have your good times and your bad times,” says Kevin Dinnison, now in his fifth decade as club treasurer and secretary and who runs the Nangwarry Serv-wel deli.
“It’s just that ours is going a bit longer than we would’ve liked.
“We’ll win one. It might not be this year, but we’ll win another one. And when we do? Geez — we’ve won four flags, but that would be a close fifth.
“I hope it happens next year, just to see the look on the blokes’ faces. They deserve it, they bloody deserve it, just for sticking it out.”
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