Quite simply it is a club where players want to play and not leave, a club where players approach the club to go there and not the other way around, a club where players sacrifice more to stay rather than sacrificing something to leave.
Just over three years ago Don Falvo was appointed the coach of Sunraysia’s interleague team, a team that hadn’t won a representative game in 10 years.
The SFNL had slipped down in the new ranking system of the state country leagues into the low 20s, a team that had been losing to minor leagues in representative football and losing quite easily too.
Falvo and I spoke on the phone a few times when he was appointed for him to gauge my interest in helping him and joining his team.
We were always passionate about our league when we were playing, what he needed though was to find a way to try and get that same hunger back from the current crop that we had, when we were playing against the best leagues in country football.
We honestly didn’t know what it was that had changed so much, but what we did know was that the issues of representative footy were not only an issue with our league, it was with nearly every other league in country footy as well. So how could we even begin to try and change this?
This is where someone like Falvo absolutely shines. You would think after all that he has achieved in his long and storied football career that he would just take a back seat, lap up all the pats on the back and just fade away into the bliss of retirement.
Nope, this is not Donny.
The man is quite simply obsessed with footy, but not just footy – local footy!
Falvo wants our league to be the best and openly states this to anyone who will listen. He gives his time to everyone one who asks, whether it be coaching junior sides at Robinvale Euston, coaching junior Sunraysia sides, even going to other clubs nearly every week to help run training for their junior sides.
When Falvo, Vince Iudica and I sat down the first time, we spoke about making the Sunraysia rep side the 10th club in the league.
What did we mean by that? We wanted to have a club culture built around the interleague team, a team that was familiar with each other, a team who wanted to be a part of what we were building whenever we reached out to them, a team that wanted to train together and become better together and a team that wanted to do all this with nothing back in return other than to see success and feel pride.
The players announced recently in our squad haven’t been selected because we need to make up numbers and we just hope they come to training. They have each been selected because they bring something to the table for our newly founded club and that we know will be at training because they now want to be there.
You will also note that we have simply gone for locals and ex-locals who live away and still come back of a weekend to play at their home clubs or recruits who now reside in the region.
This was deliberate, the reason being is we know that they will want to be part of the newly founded club long into the future and not just this year.
So what is a destination club? Well it’s one where players sacrifice things to be part of it.
This next part is where our 10th club starts to realise that we are on the right track of setting a good culture and has the foundations for success, it’s when you know you’ve become a destination club.
This week, two fly-in, fly-out players in reigning McLeod medallist Benji Neal of Robinvale and superstar Jonah Licht of South Mildura reached out personally to Falvo to ask if they could be part of our new club.
This puts us in a big conundrum in regard to how we look at our team morals and standards, given they are not living in the region.
So why do I bring this up? Well quite simply because these two stars have fallen in love with our league and their local clubs so much that they are willing to come and spend the week before our upcoming rep game in July just to train with our club in the hope they have the chance to pull on our jumper.
They will pay their own airfares up and back and sacrifice a few days’ pay back home just to have the chance to be in our team. Now that’s a decent sacrifice for players who have nothing to gain other than pride and a place alongside their peers in battling for our league’s honour.
This doesn’t make these players a walk-up start for game day. However it is a massive move in the right direction that we now have players like these two willing to sacrifice so much for our league’s colours, and all for no money, only for the pride of our league.
