MONDAY is D-Day for the Meringur Football Netball Club as it battles for survival.
Club president Ron Hards has sounded a rallying call for Kangaroo supporters and the Meringur district to get behind the embattled footy club.
The Roos have been fighting against an exodus of players and off-field personnel, which could force it into recess for 2012.
The fate of the proud club could be sealed on Monday night at Chaffey Park in Merbein as it holds its second AGM. It is the last roll of the dice following a poor attendance at the first AGM on January 16.
The club is in a sound financial position, but if it gets another poor attendance on Monday night the Roos will be forced into recess for the upcoming season.
After finishing on the bottom of the ladder the past season with only two wins, Hards said it was time for the community to stand up and support their football club.
“If people are serious about supporting the football club they’ll show up on Monday night,” the staunch Millewa identity said.
“We haven’t tried to advertise the club, we’ve got to get genuine support, people who genuinely want the football club to do well will be there,” he said. The Roos are still without a coach and Hards said that was the number one vacancy the club needed to fill.
“It would be good to get a high-profile coach because that would enhance your possibility of getting good players,” he said.
With “12 to 15” players already signalling their intentions to pull on the blue and white strip this season, Hards said the club would need 25 to 30 people on Monday night to consider the AGM a success.
Even if Meringur go into recess for 2012, the Roos will still pay their affiliation fees to the Millewa Football League to remain registered.
“It’s still important to have people to keep the club going, to look at recruiting and look for coaches and things like that,” he said.
“If the football club is not there it’s just another thing the community is missing out on.
“That’s what the community has to think about, whether they want to support the club or sit at home on a Saturday afternoon.”
The club has a long and proud history – it is the oldest continually running club in the Millewa.
The plight of the Roos has already drawn much needed support from other Sunraysia footy clubs.
Merbein Football Club, which found itself in similar dire straits a few years ago, and is rebuilding on and off the field, had some insightful and much valued advice for their football league cousins yesterday.
Former president and current vice-president of the Merbein Football Club, Ian Carter, echoed Hards’ sentiment.
“They need the support on and off the field,” Carter said.
“Past players and past supporters need to rally around Ron Hards who has been a stalwart of that football club,” he said.
The situation the Meringur club finds themselves in is not too dissimilar to the situation Merbein found themselves in three years ago.
Heading into the 2009 season, Merbein was down on it’s knees with a debt Carter estimates was about $40,000.
Having not made the top-four since their 2003 premiership triumph over Imperials, the club failed to win a game in 2009.
However, despite the onfield dramas, steps were being taken off the field to restore Merbein to their former glory.
Merbein secretary Vicki Krake said the committee came on board to save the club – to get the Magpies out of the red and back into the black.
“The club needed to be saved, we were struggling to put a team on the field, plus we had a lot of younger under-18s coming through and we needed to save to club for those guys.”
Arriving with the club in urgent need of community and league support, Krake said the first box the club need to tick was the restoration of the club’s membership base.
“The first thing was to get membership up to at least 500 which was well supported by the community,” she said.
“We did a big sponsorship drive to get sponsorship for the club as well, and then we had to do a drive to get a lot of volunteers to give their time.
“Then we basically went though phonebooks, anything, to get people.
“We would have sent out 800 letters to get 500 members.”
The committee at Kenny Park dropped to only five on the board, but that has been built up again thanks to the tireless work of those behind the scenes.
For 2012, Merbein will have 14 people on the committee with several people new to the football club.
Needless to say, everyone has the same objective out at Kenny Park.
“There’s quite a few others who just wanted to save the football club,” she said.
“You can’t have a small town like Merbein without a football club really.”
After putting in three years of hard work, Krake said it was a tough situation that Meringur found themselves in.
“They’ve probably got a harder job than what we have, it’s a smaller community out there, there’s nowhere to draw your membership base from,” she said.
“It’s a lot of hard work but you’ve just got to knuckle down and hopefully get the support of the community.
“All the clubs have got to get behind Meringur if they want to save it.”
After finishing last season in sixth position with five wins, Krake said the Magpies should push for a finals berth this season for the first time in almost a decade.
The Magpies will celebrate their 2002 and 1962 premierships with the reunion to be held in the June long weekend, which will be the club’s major fundraiser this year.
This article appeared in Saturday’s Sunraysia Daily 28/01/2012.
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