Footy club shuts down

TRAINING and scheduled practice matches will be cancelled as Newtown & Chilwell Football Netball Club shuts its doors this week and formulates a plan to combat coronavirus.

A message sent to the club’s supporters last night said that all club activities this week were called off, including senior and junior training and use of the clubrooms and club gym.

The senior Eagles teams were due to play a practice match against Uni Blues on Saturday and netball teams were scheduled for pre-season games against St Joseph’s on Thursday, all of which have been canned.

The shutdown at Elderslie Reserve will be re-evaluated after a week.

Club president Shaun McWilliam said the decision was made at a meeting yesterday morning.

“We just probably need to prepare ourselves a little bit with drink bottles and hand sanitisers, we want to disinfect the gym and all of that stuff,” he said.

“We just need a plan in place and we didn’t have one.

“We felt we would rather get this ready over the preseason than lose time during the season so we are getting ready for it.”

Last week, AFL Barwon said all local football and netball events were scheduled to run as planned but consideration would be taken for delaying the season based on advice from AFL Victoria.

McWilliam said his club wanted a chance to take a breath amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The club has set up a health group to deal with the virus.

“For us it was just about pressing pause on it for a minute, understand it, get some professional opinions on it and probably set ourselves up a little bit better at the club,” McWilliam said.

“It’s about making people feel comfortable at the moment.

“We are proceeding as per normal on the season, we are still ordering jumpers and all of that.

“But we’re just putting in place things as simple as hand sanitiser that we might not be set up for if we had training (tonight).”