The fight to keep our best
HOW do we keep a GDFL side together in Werribee?
It’s a challenge we face every year at Werribee Centrals, simply because of the competition we face from neighbouring clubs from rival leagues.
There are at least eight WRFL clubs based in the City of Wyndham — Hoppers Crossing, Werribee Districts, Wyndham Vale, Glen Orden, Manor Lakes, Sanctuary Lakes, Wyndham Suns and Tarneit — and another two in the VAFA being Point Cook and Westbourne Grammarians.
People may think it’s no different to GFL, BFL and GDFL clubs competing in the same pool of players in the greater Geelong city, but there’s a slight difference.
I think the Geelong guys know what level they’re at; and that’s the level of football they want to play.
If a player decides they’re at GDFL standard, every club has the same salary cap.
Where we differ is we would probably find ourselves somewhere among Division 1 and Division 2 WRFL clubs, meaning there are probably a number of different levels our players could find themselves playing at.
The other difficulty is, our salary cap is nowhere near that of Division 1 or Division 2 WRFL, and we don’t try to spend it all either because we don’t think we’re at where we should be. We’re trying to bring our young guys through from our Colts side, from last year and from this year, and we’d rather spend the money locally to try and get these kids to hang around.
It’s a Catch 22 situation where you try and get enough good players to keep you at a certain level where you’re not getting smashed every week, while developing your juniors.
And then it becomes a waiting game, waiting for the kids to come through, to build the basis of a good side.
I’ve probably got young fellas down here now, 17 turning 18, playing good footy, but the lure to play WRFL is there if they’re good enough, and they’re offering probably three or four times the amount of money we could offer.
We need to start trying to lock away our young blokes but at the same time we don’t want to be sticking a heap of pressure on them — they’re probably already getting pressure from outside clubs.
It comes down to culture; creating a club that makes them want to stay.
We love the fact we play country footy — we love it from a club point of view, and that’s the way we’ve got to sell it. And we want to be a club where guys play with their mates.
If it’s not about the money it’s about trying to get groups of mates to play together.
It’s what we have to achieve at Werribee Centrals — keeping all our players together so they want to play senior footy with their mates.
If we can achieve that, I’m confident we’ll be a sustainable GDFL club for a long time.