Estelle Lawler’s tremendous dedication to Liverpool netball
IT’S been 40 odd years since Estelle Lawler joined the Liverpool City Netball Association — and the 77-year-old volunteer shows no signs of slowing down.
Local Sports Stars
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IT’S been 40 odd years since Estelle Lawler joined the Liverpool City Netball Association — and the 77-year-old volunteer shows no signs of slowing down.
Ms Lawler, of Lurnea, has been nominated for the Service to Sport Award as part of NewsLocal’s Local Sports Star competition.
The award recognises an individual or volunteer from a local organisation who has made significant contributions to a sport.
As Liverpool City Netball Association’s (LCNA) secretary for the past 20 years, Ms Lawler is pivotal to the organisation’s operations — most recently helping to co-ordinate the 2018 netball state age championships hosted at Woodward Park.
Ms Lawler joined LCNA after enrolling her seven-year-old daughter and watching her play. She subsequently took up umpiring and coaching before eventually playing netball herself.
Ms Lawler said the association’s intake of clubs had grown over the past four years.
“We’ve got close to 2000 players every Saturday on our grounds,” she said.
But while numbers have shot up, the game still suffers from a lack of sponsorship.
“Everybody would like sponsors on a semi-permanent basis to help the association. It gets quite expensive when you have to buy all the equipment and you have to buy the uniforms for the kids,” she said.
She recalls writing letters to 45 businesses in the Liverpool CBD four years ago, asking for a small sponsorship and receiving only one reply — a ‘no’.
Despite this, she says, the association will keep prevailing with what it does have.
“We’re quite content with what we’ve got and if a sponsorship comes our way, that’s great,” Ms Lawler said.
“As long as we can do everything we need to do for the season, that’s all that worries us.”
■ To nominate someone for one of the four LSS categories, visit localsportsstars.com.au.