Trying to stop the rot
TO the casual footy follower, the downfall of AFL Cairns club Cairns City Lions may seem sudden.
But, to those invested in the football club’s long-term affairs, the rot at Holloways Beach Sporting Complex started long ago.
Ask those in senior roles at Lions since the merger, the conversation will arrive at a “poor club culture” soon enough.
Coaches, administrators and commentators preach at all levels of footy, whether it be AFL, local footy, junior footy and everything in between, the need for a positive culture around a footy club.
It is something that cannot be defined or measured.
A positive club culture happens when the majority of areas of a footy club align – players, coaches, administrators and support staff.
The Lions are in the infancy of rebuilding their club culture.
But can you rebuild something you never had?
Since the merger – Cairns City’s Cobras in need of juniors and Redlynch Lions Juniors in need of a senior club – to form the Cairns City Lions in 2011, the Holloways Beach-based club have punted coaches year on year and never made the finals.
The Lions are the only club in that time to not make the post-season in AFL Cairns, with every other club spending time as a contender and a cellar dweller, except Cairns Saints, who have played finals every year.
The on-field performances have been poor but the Lions have kicked some goals off the field. The Lions committee has wiped away about $100,000 in debt and own and run the sports club at Holloways Beach.
Outgoing Lions president Wayne Keygan, who spent five years in the role, is proud of the work the committee completed.
“The club was in a fair predicament, it was a dire situation around the time of the merger,” Keygan said.
“They did not have a junior side and they were on life support. The merger got things happening and we paid off a lot of debt.”
Keygan prepared crisis meetings earlier this year with atrocious numbers on the training track and called for the club to “stop the bickering and fighting, which seems to be what this club has been about for the last 15 years or 20 years”.
Following the meetings, the Lions dropped from two teams to just one for the 2017 season.
Keygan said he wrote to AFL Cairns almost 18 months ago, outlining the dire situation at the club and feels league headquarters were slow to intervene.
While there is optimism in recent weeks, the Lions are teetering on the brink of survival after losing countless players in the off-season fol- lowing the botched sacking of playing-coach Aaron McNab.
Luke Webb, who was at the club for almost two seasons, one as co-coach with McNab, said the committee did not do enough to improve the culture in his time at the club.
“Where I felt let down was that they knew I was big on club culture and I wanted to get rid of a few people and get some decent people around the footy club,” Webb said.
“There is a bad culture there, you cannot have that.
“If that meant sacrificing on-field success, we needed to do that to improve the club culture. The committee were behind that idea until they needed to make decisions and they did not want to make decisions.”
Webb quit the club in the middle of season 2016 following an after-hours incident with his co-coach McNab.
The Lions have had a different coach each of the last five seasons, with Jason Roe, Marc Harbrow, John Tootell, McNab and Webb and now Syd Fatnowna calling the shots.
Harbrow, who now coaches the Manunda Hawks, was left frustrated the Lions committee had already approached Tootell to take over while he was still coaching during the 2014 season.
Tootell, who also coached North Queensland, thought the club was moving in the right direction when he left the Far North to relocate to Tasmania.
“It was always the same situation, very limited numbers to help the footy club,” Tootell said. “The committee were very hard working to get the club out of financial debt.
“We always struggled for off-field support, the work was left to very little people but they did an outstanding job.
“It is sad to hear the situation they are in now.”
With a lack of local numbers comes the over-reliance on overpaid interstate recruits, which Webb, now based in Wagga Wagga, feels contributed to the club’s poor culture.
“There was always a big clash between the local blokes and the blokes that come in from interstate and get paid,” Webb said. “There was that divide. “Even in those two factions, if you want to call them that, there were divides in them.
“A lot of footy clubs have that though but maybe up in Cairns it is a bit more exacerbated because they were not getting results on the field. We tried our best to recruit good people to the club but a lot of people did leave because of the committee and the way things were run, I do not blame them.”
AFL Cairns president Gary Young is confident the Lions will improve in 2018, but they need to get through 2017 first.
“Our operations manager Craig Lees and I will be there to walk them through the process to make sure sound decisions are made and hopefully make it a destination for players to head too,” Young said.
“That has been the criticism for four of five years, players were hearing all this stuff and the club never seemed to do what they said. They are going OK but they need to get the culture right and make it a positive and proactive environment that does what it says it is going to do.”