Tournament ends on bumper note

SIX Sunraysia soccer clubs hit the park to wrap up the 2021 Sunraysia Football Federation (SFF) round-robin tournament over the weekend.

And while SFF general manager Susan Watts said player participation has decreased after COVID-19, the 46 games over the course of the tournament made her feel hopeful for the season, especially when it came to juniors.

“A lot of people have come back on board but I still feel there is a little bit of hesitancy about signing up for things –  perhaps because people think there might be a COVID-19 breakout and we might get shut down – but I think if we keep providing the opportunities then people will take us up and come down and play.

“We ran our Sunraysia representative squad – we don’t normally run it this early in the year – but we took them to a Bendigo tournament a couple of weekends back.

“Our rep numbers are definitely up on previous years … normally we’d only run 12s, 14s and 16s, but at Bendigo we had teams in each age group.

“And our juniors have been training consistently since Christmas and there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm there.”

Next on the horizon for the junior Sunraysia representatives is a tournament on the June long weekend in Geelong.

“The Bendigo tournament was played with half-pitch games but the Geelong one is back to full pitch, so team sizes are bigger, but we’re still looking like we’re going to hold up and fill all age groups,” Watts said.

“That shows me the kids really want to get back and play.”

And after that, Mildura will hosts the South Australian Junior Soccer Association Country Championship August 28-29.

“That’ll be 1000 kids coming from all over South Australia to play,” Watts said.

In a nutshell, Watts said the weekend was “busy”.

“I was interested to see how people would take to the different format … there were shorter games and everything was go, go, go so everyone was quite excited,” she said. “A lot of the adults were excited to get back out on to the pitch, have a kick and play some games.

“It was a really positive environment and people were really enjoying it. And the girls are delighted to have their own change rooms now.”

Because the format was round-robin, there was no grand final at the weekend.

“It was just whoever was on top of the ladder at the end of week 2,” Watts said.

Mildura City Soccer Club won Senior Men, Senior Women, Under-16 Mixed and Under-16 Girls.

Mildura United Soccer Club won Reserve Men.

Nichols Point Soccer Club 1 won Under-14 Mixed and Under-12 Mixed. Irymple Knights Soccer Club won Under-13 Girls.