How your sport is emerging from the Covid gloom
NSW’s Fab Five of sport - football, hockey, rugby league, AFL and netball - are bloodied but upbeat as they emerge from the shadow of Covid. See how they are placed for 2022.
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Grassroots sport is a language we all speak and it’s the glue of communities from Bega to Tweed Heads and Byron Bay to Bourke.
But like all facets of everyday life, it’s copped a pounding at the hands of the unwanted virus.
While the elite-level professional contests flexed to find a way for ‘game on’ - community sport was rocked by lockdowns and regulation over the past two years.
Fortunately there are some big plans for grassroots sport in 2022.
Football
What began in Australia as an ethnic passion is now as mainstream as Vegemite.
It even has two ‘states’ in NSW.
Northern NSW Football basically takes in Newcastle to the Queensland border while Football NSW administers Sydney and the rest.
The numbers are eye-popping - Football NSW has 225,000 registered players for winter round ball, and Northern sits at around 66,000.
Football NSW chief executive officer Stuart Hodge is upbeat about the season pending.
And that comes in the wake of a back-to-back annus horribilis - in 2020 (late start for the season) and 2021 (not concluded because the state government put the kibosh on community sport as it managed the pandemic).
“We’re certainly getting the feeling that people are eager to get back out onto the field,” Hodge said.
“After a couple of years of disruption, football is providing an opportunity for people to reconnect with friends and communities.
“In talking to our various associations and clubs the players are very mindful of the physical benefits they get of playing football but also the mental health benefits.”
Hodge said the biggest problem facing football is growing pains.
“Our biggest challenge is facilities and keeping up with the demand,” he said.
“Especially next year - Australia will host the FIFA Women’s World Cup and we expect there’ll be even more demand.
“As we’ve seen massive growth in participation - the fields unfortunately and the infrastructure hasn’t been able to keep up and so we’re always looking for more investment in the facilities, more volunteers, more referees, more coaches.”
Netball
Registrations are down 10 to 15 per cent on last year which is “not unexpected”, Netball NSW chief executive officer Tain Drinkwater said.
Netball though remains one of the most popular of the big codes - with 115,000 registered players in 2019 before Covid arrived.
Drinkwater said the omicron variant had made some “hesitant” to register - but “numbers have been high” since youngsters returned to school and businesses started to re-find their straps.
“2022 is going to be the year where we adapt,” she said.
Regions have been the engine room for community netball where Drinkwater noted “we kept a lot of competitions running in 2021, and even in 2020”.
“They are the lifeblood.”
Covid’s impact on metro teams was more significant, particularly in Newcastle, Sydney and the Illawarra.
“But we have a strong loyal base,” she said.
While NSW gets used to living with the virus, Drinkwater said there were signs of a “real appetite to connect with community netball”.
The face of netball in 2022, and particularly at the grassroots level, marked a “watershed” moment for the sport as it re-emerges.
“We need to live with this new normal,” she said.
“We’ve had half-a-season” of netball over the past two years.
“We have to come up with a compelling argument for people to connect with community netball.”
AFL
Marc Geppert is the community football regional manager, and his patch covers NSW (everywhere outside of Sydney), plus the ACT.
Pre-virus, there were 53,000 registered club-based participants on the books.
“From a participation tracking perspective we have been really mindful to ensure we are comparing our numbers to 2019 to understand the health of clubs and leagues,” Geppert said.
“2020 you could see the significant impact that Covid had on our code where we dropped back to 41,000.
“2021 was a sensational effort by our clubs and leagues to bounce back to have 95 per cent of our 2019 numbers with 51,028 players braving the Covid uncertainty.”
AFL heartland is the larger population centres.
“Our Sydney, our Canberra and probably our Newcastle or Hunter markets ... we’ve been really lucky to see some really good growth across those bigger metro areas the last couple of years even during the Covid pandemic,” he said.
But in the regions - especially rural remote areas - it’s been about maintaining the small clubs, Geppert said.
“There’s no doubt at the moment our biggest growth market is female footy,” he said.
“Sydney Swans attracting an AFLW licence for their upcoming campaign is another exciting chapter for us which is going to help us facilitate a lot of growth especially in our northern markets.”
He said the AFL had cut its cloth to suit as it established a footprint in NSW.
In the southern regions and to avoid a clash with netball and a scramble for the same athletes, female competitions are played midweek.
While the outlook is rosy, Geppert said Covid had scarred the grassroots.
“The last two years have been very straining for our volunteers. Volunteers normally don’t complain about doing what they love,” he said.
“In NSW and ACT last year we got through an entire season and we didn’t get one grand final away.
“That takes a lot out of our volunteers.”
Hockey
They use a third party company, Rev SPORT, as a player registration management platform, giving hockey access to data and analysis.
In a non-Covid year, some 27,000 registered players would swish the sticks.
But in a 2021 wracked by lockdowns and the like, hockey had to cancel a number of events - particularly national and state, some of which were played in a January ‘catch-up’.
“We’re already tracking ahead of 2019 (pre-Covid registrations) and that’s sort of what I am using as the benchmark,” Hockey NSW interim CEO Craig Beed said.
“The sense we’re getting is ... people really are quite desperate to get back to sport.
“Looking into 2022 we’re quite buoyed by that sentiment.”
Hockey has a point-of-difference to the other major codes - which is a plus and a yoke.
“The other thing for us that makes hockey in NSW a little bit different to maybe other sports and hockey in other areas is that we’re 70 per cent based in country NSW,” Beed said.
“Regional is a real strength.”
The metro market is a harder nut to crack.
“Sydney’s a real challenge for us because getting facilities, getting land is hard work,” he said.
“There’s a couple of areas we’ve identified in Sydney where we’d love to have a hockey facility because we know when we have a facility we have players.
“It’s almost like a field of dreams - build it and they will come.”
To that end hockey is working with Blacktown and Hills Shire councils - two population growth areas - in a bid to establish fields.
“Hockey’s a real family sport. You tend to have the daughters and the sons, mum and dad, and even grandparents all playing,” Beed said.
Rugby league
Despite plenty of reports that the sport is being squeezed, the NSW Rugby League (NSWRL) believes they have turned a corner.
“Currently we are tracking ahead of the great numbers for both male and female participation from the corresponding stage last season,” a spokesperson said.
“The NSWRL enjoyed record growth in 2021, with the total number of participants rising more than five per cent - male participants showing their highest growth in six years while female participation broke 20,000 for the first time in history.
“Grassroots football has an important role to play in helping the community come back together and heal as the world continues to grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic.”
* NSW Rugby was approached but did not respond.
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