Wyong Leagues Club Group to inject $500k into junior footy
THE loss of the Central Coast’s most elite senior NRL team is junior football’s gain with grassroots league set to receive its biggest ever funding injection in living memory.
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THE loss of the Central Coast’s most elite senior NRL team is junior football’s gain with grassroots league set to receive its biggest ever funding injection in living memory.
As the Express Advocate exclusively revealed the Wyong Leagues Club Group board voted earlier this year to end its feeder club arrangement with the Sydney Roosters.
The decision means the Wyong Roos will not field a team in the NRL second grade Intrust Super Premiership next season.
Instead Wyong Leagues Club Group will inject more than $500,000 over five years by providing $10,000 to all junior clubs not already associated with a registered leagues club such as the Erina Eagles, The Entrance Tigers and Woy Woy Roosters.
In a letter sent to junior clubs Wyong Leagues Club Group said as it would no longer incur the expenses of fielding an Intrust Super Premiership team it would funnel this money into “looking after the Central Coast’s juniors”.
It looked at the South Sydney model where the club operates solely to provide free rugby league to 14 junior clubs.
“While they spend about $2.4 million a season, which is way out of our league, we looked at two areas integral to the game, ground fees and referees fees,” the letter read.
“”Given these discrepancies, we found that the average paid by each club for each of these two items was approximately $5k. Thus we thought the simplest way was to donate $10k to each of the non-leagues club supported clubs to assist with their ever increasing costs.”
The clubs will be made to sign a document agreeing the money will be spent on ground and referee fees and not “presentation days” or other non-essential costs.
Wyong Leagues Club Group has told clubs the funding would be $10,000 early next year with the “hope it may become an ongoing commitment”.
However this newspaper understands the club has earmarked the funding for the next five years bringing the commitment to more than half a million dollars.
“It would seem that the NRL and NSWRL, who continue to play lip service to grassroots rugby league, will continue to sit on their hands so we had better do the best we can ourselves,” the letter to junior clubs read.
The club said while money was not the “be all and end all”of solving issues facing the junior game — under siege from a massive exodus in teenage ranks and the threat of AFL and soccer — it hoped a future “combined effort” from licenced clubs could help.
SUPER LEAGUE WINDFALL
TACKLING bags, training shirts, goalpost pads, a new linemarking machine — they’re “wish list” items and every junior rugby league club has them.
But when the majority of clubs survive on the sniff of an oily rag and the generosity of volunteers, parents and coaches, most “wish list” items just get rolled over at the end of the season to another year in the hope jagging a new sponsor or some other benefactor.
Enter Wyong Leagues Club Group’s decision to fund junior clubs $10,000 a year over five years and all of a sudden “wish list” items start becoming a tantalising reality.
Gosford Kariong Storm assistant registrar Vanessa Bird said junior clubs spent a lot of time “juggling what needs to be replaced” against what they would like.
“The wish list ends up getting rolled over year-on-year because ground fees and ref fees eat into what we can afford,” she said.
Ms Bird said the junior club with 13 teams and about 160 players had to recently upgrade its line marking machine, which meant new tackling bags, goalpost pads and other training equipment would have to wait.
She said the $10,000 funding to cover ground and ref fees would free up money for the club to replace worn out gear, buy new equipment and potentially get more volunteers trained in first aid and coaching courses — costs often borne by the parents themselves.
“This (funding) is what helps the club to survive because you can’t keep putting prices up in the canteen,” she said.
She said it could also mean they had more training cones, pads and balls so teams did not have to share so much at training.
HOW TO SPEND MORE THAN $10K WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
■ 160 training shirts @ $25ea: $4,000
■ linemarking machine: $2100
■ goalpost pads x4 @ $700ea: $2800
■ 8 training balls for 13 teams @ $20ea: $2080
TOTAL: $10,980