By: Troy Swainston – Chief Executive Officer – Eastern Football League
Where has the season gone? Our junior boys and girls have two weeks remaining, the senior women’s have three weeks left and our netball season has a divisional split finish with three and four weeks remaining to finals. Our senior men’s season has a staggered finish to enable the League to manage finals across the entire competition. With only a few weeks left, finals, promotion and relegation will be a big part of the conversations being had at clubs. We look forward to an exciting finish to the season.
Over the past fortnight, we have received completed surveys back from clubs in relation to our 2019 Club Wellbeing Survey. The survey was developed in consultation with Eastern Health. We received 150 responses from clubs which was an outstanding result. Some of the headline stats show that 75 per cent of respondents were male and 25 per cent female, 36.5 per cent of respondents were from junior clubs, 52.5 per cent senior clubs and 11 per cent from both combined junior and senior – one club.
We received responses from a wide variety of club people, presidents, committee members, coaches, football managers and netball coordinators. The clear priorities for us to focus on are general club culture, mental health and respectful relationships. Providing clubs with access to training in supporting mental health and well being will be a key goal. Our goal for 2020 and 2021 is to provide fully-funded SALT sessions to our clubs tailored specifically address to the key priorities from the survey results.
Last week I spent two days offsite at RACV Healesville at an AFL Victoria Country Regional General Managers and Metropolitan League CEOs Conference. It was a great networking conference with a light agenda which meant the leagues spent most their time discussing and workshopping new initiatives, success stories and working through present challenges. Coming away from the conference there are some initiatives and processes that other leagues do better well and that we can introduce into the League. It also reinforced that overall, we have a great competition, clubs and volunteers. Key discussion looked at ideas and initiatives on how we can continue to evolve, the League and reduce the burden on our club volunteers. A couple of key initiatives we will consider for season 2020 are introducing a match review panel and reviewing various options around club funding and invoicing models. As we travel the grounds each week, we look forward to sounding out clubs to gather thoughts and feedback on some of these potential new initiatives.
Our Silent Sunday initiative generated some big headlines and debate about what we want to see more and less of at junior football (and sport in general). The awareness this initiative generated was significant reaching mainstream TV and radio. We were very pleased with the way Channel 7 captured the spirit of the initiative, the support we received from clubs and the Heathmont Junior Football club who hosted the Channel 7 crew on Sunday morning at their club.
Good luck to all teams on the weekend and remember to tune into the Eastland match of the round on 1377 SEN+ or watch the live stream via the EFL website.
