$20 a loss, $40 a win: The

MICK Turner vividly recalls the look on his players’ faces when Geelong utility Geoff Miles arrived at Barwon Heads on the eve of the 1993 BFL season.

Only six months earlier, Miles had lined up for the Cats on the MCG against his former side West Coast in the AFL grand final, named forward pocket in an attack boasting Gary Ablett Sr, Billy Brownless and Barry Stoneham among others.

“I can still remember him walking into the club and all the players were looking at me thinking, ‘This is not really happening is it?’,” said Turner, who was football manager at the Seagulls.

“‘Geoff Miles, who’s just played for Geelong and done a full pre-season, he’s not playing for Barwon Heads (is he)?’

“He walked in and played at Barwon Heads, and at that level, we used to play him at full forward and he used to sit on people’s heads. He was a revelation in that side.”

The Seagulls hadn’t won a BFL premiership for 17 years prior to 1993 and when Turner, the champion Geelong wingman, arrived two years earlier, the club had a lot of work to do.

“As it turned out, the club was in a lot of trouble and some really good people got on board like Ricky Barham and a few others and gradually clawed the club back into the black,” he said.

“I was there in probably ’91 — I was vice president or footy director, something like that.

“We went on a pretty big recruiting network, got Mick Higgins in as coach and got a lot of good players in. But our mantra was they had to have a connection to Barwon Heads, so have a holiday house or something, we didn’t just go out willy-nilly.”

By 1993, enough sponsors were on board to help the club pay players, but it certainly wasn’t big coin.