AS far as footy games go, this one was meant to be harmless. Friendly, even.

A gentle exhibition match between the old boys from Buckleboo and Kelly to help celebrate the happy amalgamation of the neighbouring clubs on the northern Eyre Peninsula two decades earlier.

“But, you know what — after all those years we still couldn’t do it,” former Buckleboo ruckman Michael Kemp grins.

“This must’ve been 10 years ago now, to celebrate the 20 years since we merged. We decided to get the past players together to have a supposedly friendly game of football.

“These are all blokes 45 and older — and obviously we never got over some of the scraps we had when we were 25. Only took a couple of centre bounces too, barely even five minutes into the game.

“We had a lot of beer and friendly chats afterwards, but there was just too many of us who, as soon as you crossed that white line, all that mattered was Buckleboo winning.

“It was just like the old days again.”

The old days, in this case, are before the 1989 football season, before the Kimba District and County Jervois football associations combined to form the Eastern Eyre Football League.

Back then, Kimba District was a four-team competition, made up of Kimba Football Club, Buckleboo, Kelly and Waddikee.

In the 1989 merger, old rivals Kimba, Buckleboo and Kelly combined to form a new Kimba Districts club, while Waddikee joined up with Darke Peak to create a six-team Eastern Eyre Football League alongside Cowell, Cleve, Rudall and Ports.

In the 30 years since, Darke Peak-Waddikee has dissolved, and in 2012 Cleve and Rudall merged to form Eastern Ranges, leaving today’s four-club league.

“When we merged with Kimba and Kelly there were plenty of people against it,” Kemp says.

“To be honest, it didn’t go very smoothly. But it had to happen. Two of the clubs were in real trouble with players.

“So merging was an inevitable situation.”

Plenty has changed across generations in South Australia’s regions — from wool and grain prices to rainfall patterns and the escalating size of farms.

But one glaring constant is the relationship between a community and its football-netball club.

Today, the social and sporting fabric of South Australia’s regions is being stretched by population decline.

Forget salary caps and sponsorships and stricter drink-driving laws that curtail Saturday night bar-takings — the No. 1 issue threatening towns and country sport is the gradual drain of people from the regions.

The simple maths equates that as farms get bigger, schools get smaller — and, eventually, close.

Technology advances and economies of scale mean one farming family can now work the same land previously occupied by five.

Fewer farms means fewer jobs and fewer families.

Even among those who stay, teenage children are often compelled to move away for school, studies or employment opportunities.

Often, that reality leaves vulnerable sporting clubs facing a difficult ultimatum — merge, or perish.

“Footy and netball, those two sports are the ones that people are still passionate about,” says Eastern Eyre president Andrew Jenner.

“Even if you’re not directly involved you still want to watch. It’s the only glue we really have.

“We all know it — and I think that’s why so many people put so much hard work into it.

“If we didn’t have that, I would be very worried about country towns.”

Sarah Powell spent her childhood at Darke Peak and now lives on a grain and Merino sheep property near Wharminda near Arno Bay on Eyre Peninsula.

In 2015 Powell initiated a Champions Academy to mentor prospective leaders within sporting clubs.

She says the health and success of a town’s footy club is effectively a measure of the vitality of the town itself.

“Sporting clubs are the spirit, or the pulse, of the community,” Powell says.

“And just like in a person, when the pulse stops, vitality is lost — irretrievably.

“That sporting club is not just the social place for people to meet, or to get some relief from the isolation of rural living. For a lot of people, that’s their actual source of social cohesion.

“It’s a place where young people come to kick the ball around or shoot some goals in netball. “But it’s also a place where they learn by observation how to be actively involved in their communities.

“They learn how to become leaders, and those vital life skills that position them really well to go on to other roles in their communities outside of the sporting club.”

Former SA Community Football League chairman and long-time bush footy advocate David Shipway tells of the role a sporting club plays in the life cycle of a typical regional family.

For any country lad, Shipway says, Mum and Dad probably met at the footy club. They likely “wet the baby’s head” there after his birth.

The clubrooms were where he staged his 18th and his 21st birthdays. In adulthood he likely met a netballer, and the pair celebrated their own engagement and wedding there.

It’s where he spent Saturdays in winter, playing or coaching, or just sipping cans in support from the sidelines.

And at the end of it all, it’s where his family and mates gathered for his wake.

This use of sporting clubs’ facilities for social gatherings is also essential to a community’s economic health, insists Jenner.

Jenner, a freight driver, says a new $1.5-million project to finally rebuild the Cleve clubrooms damaged by storms in January, 2016, is long overdue.

Winter sport has not been played at Cleve for the past three seasons while the clubrooms have stood roofless.

Jenner says the promise of state government funding to help bring a new facility to life is crucial not only for weekend sport, but to cater for residents and social activities currently lost to bigger centres.

“We’re aware that if we can do anything that attracts people to live in the towns and district, we’ll do that as well,” Jenner says.

“It’s not just completely footy focused, it’s the whole package that clubs do and we’re trying our hardest.

“With our clubrooms, we’ve designed them to be a little bit bigger than our old ones because we were losing people that were maybe having weddings and big shows, like 21sts, out of town.

“A lot would go down to Lincoln because we had no facility here to fit a 150 or 200-guest wedding.

“For us, it’s not just about football and netball and cricket. It’s about what we an provide to our community and for a town like ours that’s one of the big things — a facility to have functions and events.”

In these areas where isolation, drought and sale prices add extra pressures to mental health, latest figures show that suicide rates among rural and regional men aged 15-24 are as much as 40 per cent higher than in cities.

Signalling the vital role sporting clubs play in combating that scourge, research by La Trobe University has found that every $1 spent on a community football club returned $4.40 in social value.

The figure factors in social connectedness, wellbeing and mental health status, employment outcomes, personal development, physical health and civic pride.

SANFL community football manager Matt Duldig says the inextricable link between regions and their sporting clubs was central to the league’s ongoing push to secure the sustainability of teams and leagues.

“That’s a real driver for SANFL,” Duldig says.

“We understand the importance of the role of clubs in their local communities. If the clubs fail, the communities suffer — which is another reason why we invest so much time and so many resources in our community football program.

“It’s that important.

“The La Trobe University study also found that the self-reported mental health of people aged 18-24 associated with a football club is substantially higher than the general population, which is why SANFL has partnered with organisations such as the Breakthrough Foundation to mental health awareness through community footy clubs across SA.”

It used to be that “merger” was a dirty word in bush footy.

To many, amalgamation was a sign of failure, and pairing with another team risked diluting a club’s identity and its achievements.

Now, increasingly, joining forces is recognised as a lifeline — not just for a sporting club and its supporters, but for the community, its people and its history.

Peter Meyer, president of the North Eastern Football League in the Clare region, said while the decision to merge could be a difficult, the implications stretched much wider than Saturday sport.

“That’s the alternative — if you don’t merge, the town will die,” Meyer says.

“You lose your footy club and all of a sudden the hotel shuts down, the post office closes and then you haven’t got any facilities left.

“The perfect example is Yacka — once footy finished there, that was the end of that town. The pub closed, the shop closed. There’s houses there still but the people living there all have to go to either Clare or Port Pirie to get anything.

“Once the football team’s gone, that’s it. They disappear.”

Meyer’s North Eastern league is arguably SA footy’s most visible success story of towns and communities fighting to retain their identities through their merged sporting clubs.

As many as 17 clubs are represented in the names of the eight teams that contest the North Eastern competition.

There’s three-way mergers in Burra-Booborowie-Hallett, Riverton Saddleworth Marrabel United and Brinkworth-Spalding-Redhill.

And two-way combinations through Eudunda-Robertstown, playing under the Southern Saints banner, Mintaro-Manoora and Blyth-Snowtown.

Even within Brinkworth-Spalding-Redhill, that combine is the result of a 1987 merger between Brinkworth-Yacka-Spalding and Gulnare-Redhill.

“With a lot of those small towns the stock agents like Elders and Landmark were basically the population and when all those mergers happened everything was shutting,” Meyer said.

“We just didn’t get any incoming population to keep those clubs going so that led people to think, ‘if we’re going to keep our identity, we’re going to have to go together’.

“They could see the writing on the wall; that if they didn’t do it, they’d be folding up — and then they wouldn’t have any sport in town.”

Club and league evolution is no new phenomenon in South Australian football.

Research into Eastern Eyre’s heritage shows as many as 43 teams dating back to 1894 — names including Carpa, Elbow Hill, Union Jacks, Carrow and Smeaton — have effectively melted down to the current four clubs.

More widely, research suggests there are as many as 112 leagues across South Australia that once operated but are now consigned to history.

They came and went in both long and short lifespans; born in boom times for farming, scrub-clearing, mining and railway expansion, and fading away through mergers, absorptions and collapses as a region’s industry and workforce shifted.

Some retain a name presence today, such as the Kowree Naracoorte and Tatiara leagues, which merged after the 1992 season to form the Kowree-Naracoorte-Tatiara competition in the South-East and crossing the Victorian border.

Others were gone in a blink, such as the Rocky River association, which ran only for the 1945 season, and the Martindale association, which failed to survive beyond its 1927 maiden year.

To combat a repeat of that dire fate, clubs are using creative and adaptive techniques to ensure their viability.

Measures include junior matches using smaller teams, and allowing under-age players to switch sides to even up contests.

Some leagues within close driving distance of Adelaide have formed relationships with metropolitan junior clubs, where players struggling to get a regular match with their home team can enjoy more game time by playing on exchange with country sides.

At senior level, a group as large as 42 Adelaide-based players from teams in the North Eastern league have trained together as part of a midweek truce before facing off in their weekend clashes.

The quirk of football amalgamations is that mergers usually occur between clubs that are nearest geographically.

The challenge in that convenience is that those clubs closest by road are inevitably the biggest enemies.

They carry generations of rivalries, tussling on the field for points, off the field for players and the endless pursuit of regional bragging rights — and suddenly they are forced to come together in a cohesive union.

“But the good thing here (Cleve and Rudall) was a lot of people embraced it right from the start,” Jenner says.

“It is funny — Cleve and Rudall were the biggest enemies, we didn’t really have a lot of time for one another. But the simple fact was that on their own, the clubs weren’t going to survive long-term.

“Plus, we’d seen how it worked for Kimba Districts, so that helped as well.

“You will always have people who want to keep what they’ve had, but sometimes that just isn’t going to work.

“You just have to do what you can to battle that population decline.”

SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S FORMER FOOTY LEAGUES

Albert District Football Association 1920-1923

Alexandra Football Association 1913-1923

Barossa & Light Football Association 1908-1986 (Merged with Gawler and District Football Association)

Barossa & Murray Valley Football Association 1947-1956

Belalie District Football Association 1929-1949

Blue Lake Football Association 1931-1937

Booboorowie Football Association 1925-1933

Border Downs Football Association 1930-1932

Boundary District Football Association 1928-1934

Broughton Football League 1910-1980

Broughton Central Football Association 1912-1939

Brown’s Well Football Association 1920-1968

Brown’s Well Line Football Association 1913-1914

Bundaleer Football Association 1939-1940

Burra Football Association 1905-1940

Cardwell Football Association 1945-1954

Carrow Football Association 1920-1932

Central Football Association 1926-1937

Central Areas Football Association 1946-1956

Central Peebinga Line Football Association 1928-1937

Central South Eastern & Border District Football Association 1924-1927

Central Yorke Peninsula Football Association 1909-1921

Cleve & Districts Football Association 1909-1961

County Eyre Football Association 1931-1946

County Jervois Football League 1962-1988 (merged with Kimba Football Association)

Cummins Football Association 1931

Drainage Areas Football Association 1920-1926

East Murray Football Association 1921-1970

Eastern Eyre Peninsula Football Association 1920-1962

Eastern Yorke Peninsula Football Association 1913-1935

Far Northern Football Association 1925-1962

Far West Football Association 1924-1960

Fleurieu Peninsula Football Association 1934

Flinders Football Association 1912-1978

Forster On Murray Football Association 1923-1929

Franklin Harbour Football Association 1900-1961

Gawler and District Football Association 1889-1986

Gilbert Football Association 1921-1934

Golden Vale Football Association 1924-1928

Gordon Football Association 1923-1929

Great Northern Football Association 1936-1960

Hills Football Association 1902-1961

Hills Central Football Association 1923-1966

Karte & District Football Association 1926-1937

Kimba Football Association 1920-1988 (Merged with County Jervois Football League)

Kooringa Football Association 1925-1930

Kowree Naracoorte Football League 1936-1992 (Merged with Tatiara Football League)

Lake Albert Football Association 1946-1948

Lakes District Football Association 1945-1954

Lameroo & Districts Football Association 1925-1993

Lameroo & Western Football Association 1923-1924

Le Hunte Football League 1919-1987

Lower North Football Association 1925-1952

Loxton Brown’s Well Football Association 1926-1931

Loxton & District Football Association 1932-1940

Loxton Line Football Association 1909-1925

Marble Range Football Association 1934-1936

Martindale Football Association 1927

Mid Murray Football Association 1910-2009

Mid North Football Association 1910-1975

Mid Western Football Association 1913-1955

Millicent Football Association 1907-1914

Mount Gambier Football Association 1894-1914

Mount Lock Football Association 1921-1933

Mount Lofty Football Association 1921-1938

Murray Bridge Football Association 1922-1925

Murray Downs Football Association 1920-1940

Murray Lands Football League 1923-1993

Murray Mallee Football Association 1932-1940

Murray Ranges Football Association 1922-1935

Murray River Football Association 1919-1931

Murray Valley Football Association 1921-1934

Naracoote Football Association 1935

Narracoote Football Association 1912-1913

North Gambier Football Association 1931-1934

North West Goldfields Football Association 1935

North Western Football Association 1911-1963

Northern Districts Football Association 1979-1984

Northern Football Association 1889-1889

Olary Ridge Football Association 1935-1935

Orroroo Football Association 1914-1923

Peake & District Football Association 1925-1940

Peterborough & Districts Football Association 1911-1961

Pinnaroo & Border Football Association 1910-1954

Port Augusta Football Association 1912-1934

Port Pirie Football Association 1893-1960

Port Pirie Shiftworkers Football Association 1923-1930

Quorn Football Association 1918-1954

Rocky River Football Association 1945

Rudall Centre Football Association 1929-1947

Rudall District Football Association 1935-1940

South East & Border Football League 1946-1963

South Eastern Country Football Association 1929-1930

South Eastern Football Association 1926-1935

Southern Ports Football Association 1928-1965

Southern Yorke Peninsula Football Association 1908-1993

Spalding Football Association 1924-1926

Stanley Football Association 1915-1936

Streaky Bay Football League 1923-1987 (merged with Le Hunte Football League to form Mid West Football League)

Tatiara Football League 1911-1992

Torrens Valley Football Association 1921-1966

Wakefield Football Association 1925-1939

Wakefield, Light & Gilbert Football Association 1904-1905

Warratta Football Association 1910-1914

Western Areas Football Association 1908-1961

Western Flinders Football Association 1924-1938

Willochra Football Association 1920-1936

Wooroora Football Association 1909-1925

Yackamoorundie Football Association 1912-1924

Yackilowie Football Association 1914-1921

Yorke Peninsula Football Association 1887-1960

Yorke Valley Football League 1910-1993