A Southern league club is fighting to avoid closing its doors at seasons end
A club with a long history in the Southern Football Netball League has accepted its fate after lack of numbers and money has led it to a dark place. Here are the details.
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Sandown Cobras’ president Ricky Logan has accepted that the next month of his club’s season will likely be its last.
Sandown, formed in 1961, dropped from Southern’s divisional football to a stand-alone Thirds side in 2019 after being unable to field two sides.
And it’s since then Logan says his club has “delayed the inevitable”.
“It looks like this will be the club’s last year, unfortunately,” he said.
“It’s where we are and the area we’re in, there’s not a lot of locals that are involved in the club at all.
“We don’t have any players that are local, really.
“When you’re not offering money to blokes in local footy, you’re not going to attract them to your club.
“I think we have delayed the inevitable for a long time.”
By not having the means to pay players and the area being “less and less football orientated”, Logan says the Cobras have found it difficult to lure players and sponsors.
“It’s all of the above,” he said.
“We lost pretty much all of our sponsors, businesses did it tough during Covid and tried to help us out while they could but this year a couple of the businesses we picked up are struggling.
“When you only have one team playing, you don’t make much money over the bar and canteen because you’re only running for a couple of hours on a Friday night.”
Logan says while there will be an absence in some of the heart and soul players’ life’s, it’s the small amount of those players that has led the club to where it is now.
“It’s definitely going to leave a hole in a few blokes’ lives, not having a club to go to anymore,” he said.
“There’s a few guys that it’s definitely their therapy, coming to footy training on a Tuesday and Thursday night.
“The problem is that it’s only a few blokes that that’s the case for and not 30 or 40 that are heart and soul of the club.
“They dwindled down over the years, so we’re only left with a handful.”
Being geographically close to a number of clubs, Logan understands the reason for concern for football in the area but expects them to remain afloat.
“There’s definitely other clubs having the same issues that we have,” he said.
“They probably have a bit more money than we have to keep paying players and bringing new players in, paying coaches and stuff.
“We got into a position a few years where the money wasn’t there to pay players at all so we weren’t paying enough.
“When you don’t pay players, you quickly start to see who’s loyal and who’s not.
“It flows on from there, guys go on to other clubs that have a few more dollars for them and then you don’t have guys coming in.”
Logan is intent on keeping the red, white and blue jumper in action on a Saturday and is in talks with Supers club Eastern Warriors to keep the legacy alive.
“We’re talking with the Supers club that play out of our ground and trying to work something out with them so the Cobras’ name lives on, possibly as an over-35s team,” he said.
“It wouldn’t quite be the same but it would at least that the Cobras’ jumper would be out there on a weekend.”
Southern Football Netball League chief executive Lee Hartman says it would be sad to see Sandown close its doors and they would need an injection of fresh volunteers to give it a spark.
“The last few years they have been a year-to-year proposition, mainly because of their demographics,” he said.
“Majority of their players travel from elsewhere to keep the club going and it’s not sustainable in the long term.
“We have been working with the club to see if we can keep it going, but we need some volunteers to step up if that was to be the case because the current volunteers have been in place for a long, long, long time and they can only do so much.
“Obviously they were in our divisional football and dropped back to Thirds, we will keep in discussion with them but I know where they’re at and where they’re placed.”
Sandown is second on the Thirds ladder with one round to play in the home and away season.
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