Doubt on comp concept
SEVEN-TIME Newtown & Chilwell premiership coach Jason Woolley believes the stars of the competition will be reluctant to suit up in a proposed makeshift tournament later this season.
As Woolley and his players yesterday came to terms with news the Geelong Football Netball League season had been abandoned, Woolley stressed that not all players would be keen to play a modified competition put forward by AFL Barwon.
“It’s a case-by-case basis,” he said.
“I think anyone across the region that plays VNL you’d put a line through, and then people might also start thinking that this is a year that we can get away from netball, travel or have some family time and get back into it next year.
“But other people might just want to tick the legs over. So I’d have to sit down with all the girls across the grades and work through it all.”
AFL Barwon is set to unveil plans for a modified regional tournament in the coming weeks in an attempt to appease clubs who are desperate to play this season.
While Woolley is supportive of the concept in general, he is unsure whether his championship-winning team will jump at the idea.
“I’d been trying to formulate what the next few weeks might look like and playing some practice matches, but whether we’d look at a regional tournament, I’m not too sure,” he said.
“Potentially we’d be interested, but we’ll see how we go.”
Woolley said yesterday’s decision had come as no surprise, with no return-to-play date set amid social distancing restrictions.
He said the Eagles were also not in favour of a breakaway netball competition, if netball was given the green light to continue if footy couldn’t.
“We’d agreed on that oneclub approach,” he said.
“The whole thing around community football and netball is everyone being part of it, so we weren’t looking at breaking away and just having netball only.”
Going in chase of an unprecedented eighth straight Agrade premiership, Woolley said his players were flat at the prospect of not taking the court in 2020.
“From that competitive point of view, we’re disappointed that the season won’t go ahead,” he said.
“Pretty much that team that we won the premiership (last year) with was the team that was going to start this season, with Nat Tommasini coming back in.
“But I’d like to think everyone would be back next year, but with work commitments, babies and family commitments, we don’t know where it lands everyone in 12 months’ time.
“But it’s just a shame we won’t have netball.
“The girls were all competitively hungry and we got all the way through to the our last session before we pulled the pin and we were lined up to have a practice game, so we’d done the hard yards and the girls were fit and firing and ready to go.
“We were confident we’d be around the mark and competitive.”