By Peter Hanlon
Penshurst enters Saturday’s Mininera league grand final on the cusp of one heck of a 150th birthday party. Stories of family and connection fill its journey, helping hold back a tide that’s swept away many in country community sport.
Like the tales of Josh Rentsch and Jacob Mibus.
Jacob Mibus (left) booted the winning goal to get Penshurst into the grand final. Josh Rentsch was close to being drafted to the AFL.Credit: Tracey Kruger
Rentsch played 14 senior games for Sturt in the SANFL last season, having come close to being drafted to the AFL when he captained Greater Western Victoria Rebels. Jaws dropped when he came home to Penshurst this year, leaving behind the game’s upper echelons like an elevator in freefall.
Penshurst’s captain and assistant coach, he splits his week between helping on the family farm and working at the Lutheran church in Hamilton with designs on becoming a pastor. He turns 21 on grand final day.
When Mibus was seven, he lost his left leg below the knee in a farm accident on Father’s Day 2016. His father Trevor remembers cradling his boy and being engulfed by a miserable thought: “There’s so much the poor little bugger’s never going to be able to do.”
A fortnight ago Jacob kicked the last goal of the one-point second semi-final win that sent Penshurst to the grand final – in shocking conditions, set shot, 40 out, as pure and sweet as Tony Lockett.
Jacob Mibus kicked Penshurst into the grand final - on a carbon-fibre leg.Credit: Tracey Kruger
And so on Saturday, a young bloke who last season played with and against footballers on AFL lists will run out alongside a teammate who is missing half a leg. At Penshurst, sport’s capacity to astound is alive and well.
Jayden Watson knows this club’s allure because he’s up to his neck in it. He grew up on a farm a few punt kicks from the footy ground; his father was a multiple league-leading goalkicker, his grandpa a fleet-of-foot gun. After winning premierships with Koroit in the better-credentialled Hampden league, he came home in 2022 and is now Penshurst’s playing-coach.
“It’s awesome for me to go into the clubrooms and see my dad up on the wall,” Watson says of the hat-trick of early 1990s premiership teams that contain many fathers of present-day players. “We’ve got five Rentschs [all cousins], their dads are in those sides too.
“I just put it down to strong family connections and the strong heritage of the club.”
The current team mirrors Penshurst’s past. Many are descendants of the German Lutherans who travelled east from South Australia in the 1850s in search of prime land, and found Australian football as a means of connecting. A handful of Indigenous players perform on lands where Marn Grook pre-dated our national game. Anglo families whose names appear on early Penshurst team sheets flesh out the on-and-off-field numbers.
“To be a standalone one-team town with no real changes in 150 years, it’s remarkable,” says president Tim Wilson, whose games in the reserves this season, aged 38, have pushed his career tally close to 300 (plus 30-odd in the seniors “when I was younger, or we needed someone to fill in”).
“With the decline of rural populations, a lot of clubs have merged with a neighbour and then the next neighbour, all of a sudden there’s five clubs merged into one. But we’ve been the same – same colours, same people. The only change was from the Red and Blacks to the Bombers.”
Watson’s 2024 senior team has featured a handful of local kids still too young to drive, and others in their early 20s who’ve circled back to their original club (no doubt buoyed by Josh Rentsch’s presence). And several Indigenous players who found Penshurst through that constant of family and connection.
Josh Rentsch (middle) with his cousins Edward and Duncan after an under-12s game when they were eight.
Another Indigenous Penshurst player, Andrew Vella (connected through a mate who married a local), has been travelling from Geelong for several years. He asked Watson to join him in the annual Vascal tournament in Torquay last October (in which a couple of non-Indigenous footballers can play in each team). There he met Ian Milera and Elijah Satala, who had recently arrived from Adelaide and were staying with Geelong star Tyson Stengle.
They hadn’t found a footy club yet, but Penshurst soon changed that. “He makes someone look silly every week,” Wilson says of Milera, shaking his head at a highlight reel of baulks, blind turns and check-side goals.
Josh Rentsch’s father James was the fifth of now seven generations of German migrants on the family’s sheep and cattle farm, and the first to play football. He laughs that his grandfather “didn’t think there was time for footy – there was always too much to do on the farm”, so his own father wasn’t allowed to play. James’ four boys and three girls have all been Penshurst footballers and netballers. A niece, Jess, has just started her AFLW career with West Coast.
Josh coming home at 20 fired the bush footy rumour mill. Club officials say of course he’s getting paid – but only a fraction of what he could command elsewhere. James says Josh threw everything into his time in the SANFL and just wanted to be back among family and community – and to make some history of his own.
Jess Rentsch plays for West Coast.Credit: AFL Photos
Wilson says the club pays under the salary cap of $75,000. “There’s more important things in life than money.”
For Penshurst’s people, there is power in the intangible. As James Rentsch says, “There’s a lot more passion playing for Penshurst than there was playing for Sturt. Back here, anyone you speak to every day, it’s all about footy. He’s certainly enjoying it.”
Jacob Mibus knows all about passion. With a sliding of life’s doors he’d have been in Paris this month representing Australia at the Paralympics.
Dad Trevor recalls doctors at the Royal Children’s Hospital telling him and wife Kathy that Jacob wouldn’t be held back by a prosthetic leg, as he was so young that the mechanics of movement would come to him naturally. Athletically gifted before the accident, he won three Australian underage cross-country titles and broke the national 400-metre record at 17 before deciding individual pursuits weren’t for him.
Josh Rentsch (left) was an AFL draft prospect and represented Vic Country.Credit: Getty Images
“I just found team sport a lot more rewarding,” says Jacob, who helps his father run Glenara, a sheep stud that breeds superfine Merino rams and has been in the family since 1920. “It was great doing athletics and winning the awards that I did, but I get more satisfaction out of the whole team coming together and having some success.”
He especially loves Penshurst footy club because they’ve given him opportunities and treated him like anyone else. Trevor (who played in five Bombers’ premierships) was rapt when Jacob graduated from juniors to reserves, and happy just to see him having a kick with his mates. Then he was picked for the seniors, kicked a goal in his first game, and hasn’t looked back.
Jacob Mibus could have been a Paralympian, but found team sport more rewarding.Credit: Tracey Kruger
“He’s just one of the boys – he just happens to have a carbon-fibre leg,” says Wilson, noting that Jacob has occasionally limped off during games before reassuring worried onlookers, “It’s OK, I’ve just busted me leg.”
Trevor adds, “He’s broken lots of legs. But there’s usually a spare, and off we go again.”
In trying farming times, where the “green drought” – the land is green on top but rock-hard underneath – can’t mask how tough things are, Penshurst is leveraging its 150th anniversary with a drive to raise $150,000 – on top of the funds needed annually to keep a football netball club afloat. The money will go towards new social and change rooms; they’re well beyond the halfway mark.
Trevor Mibus reckons a flag on Saturday would top anything he’s been part of, not least because Jacob was dropped for the 2019 grand final after kicking three the previous week. Wilson says it would be “a crowning moment” for the club. Watson won’t get ahead of himself, “but that family connection I’ve got …”
Brendan Kelly is proud to have been part of his club for a third of its lifetime, playing in premierships, taking multiple turns as president and doing all the things volunteers do. He’s also been around long enough not to get misty-eyed.
“We have all the challenges every club has,” Kelly says. “While we’re very proud that we’re still standalone, in a community sense that’s a knife’s edge. You’d only need it to dry up a little bit with locals coming through and your volunteer base drops off, and you can be on the brink pretty quick.”
Little things can go a long way, like making sure those who run out each week know what’s gone before them, and the responsibility to their community.
After Penshurst’s last senior football premiership in 2012, Mad Monday didn’t happen until the cup had featured in “show and tell” at the Tarrington Lutheran School, and made an appearance at the local retirement home.
“To see someone take the cup to the nursing home and see grandmothers and grandfathers there just beaming,” says Kelly, “that’s when you see there’s more to it than just footy.”