SANFL clubs need to be proactive on promoting their own product

GONE are the days when Hall of Famer Ian Day would call an SANFL reserves games, the mini-league and league match in a Saturday marathon. Long gone.

South's Tyson Brown is tackled by Glenelg's Dylan Reinbrecht. Picture: Dylan Coker

GONE are the days when Hall of Famer Ian Day would call an SANFL reserves games, the mini-league and league match in a Saturday marathon. Long gone.

So are the days when commercial television and radio networks would bid a king’s ransom for exclusive broadcast rights to SA’s premier sporting competition.

Now the SANFL spends - with appropriate return - big money, almost $1 million a year, to keep its matches on free-to-air television with Channel Seven.

West's Joshua Schiller and Sturt's Jack Penfold compete for the ball. Picture: Tom Huntley

But there is radio silence. And it is increasingly difficult to justify a community radio station - one dedicated, as 5RPH says, to providing “a reading and information service to the print handicapped” - spending hard-earned donations and time broadcasting SANFL games.

The big networks - such as commercial FIVEaa - are not coming back, not for the full home-and-away series anyway. Even the public ABC has a new agenda.

Gone are the days when SANFL games were so lucrative for commercial radio that one station - frustrated at being locked out of matches while the league feared losing on ticket sales - cheekily set up a raised platform outside Norwood Oval so its commentary team could call a game.

So here is another of those moments that underlines the fundamental shift in the SANFL landscape.

After 70 years of being a vital staple of the electronic media - decades of having television and radio splash money and resources on Adelaide’s biggest sport - the SANFL is now off the menu. The AFL product has saturated the market.

Again the question will be asked, particularly among the SANFL diehards, as to how their game is to thrive, let alone survive as mainstream media looks elsewhere.

And it is a critical question when the league and its eight “traditional” clubs need to maintain a meaningful presence to capture the attention of a new generation of young fans.

Channel 7's SANFL commentary team Mark Soderstrom, John Casey and Tim Ginever.

The answer is in the kids’ new media, the digital world. No longer does an SANFL club need “KG” Cunningham to turn up in suburbia with his headsets and microphone to set up a makeshift radio studio at the back of the Unley Oval grandstand.

Each SANFL club can - and should - take up broadcasting its own games. Imagine “Bulldogs Radio” at Elizabeth Oval with Grant Coffee and two of his former Central District team-mates calling games across the SANFL club’s website.

The template already exists in the WAFL where South Fremantle (also the Bulldogs) has taken up the challenge to promote its club with a weekly, hour-long radio podcast, “The Kennel”.

The SANFL this season will again live stream league matches on its website. But imagine the possibilities - the benefits - if each SANFL club became adventurous with its own game-day presentations in digital media.

Ian Day is not coming back. But the Tigers, Eagles, Panthers, Redlegs, Roosters, Bulldogs, Double Blues and Bloods could find their own “KG” and “Daisy” to offer the kick-by-kick calls on weekend. It’s time to start a new era in the SANFL.

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