■ It’s summer sport, which means it is played in the heat … deal with it. Thank goodness we have moved on from that, or have we? Every year at the tennis, football club pre-season training and the cricket we see images of elite athletes struggling with temperatures more suited to frying eggs. Last week the 40-plus days had one tennis player claiming he was dying on court. Local sport errs on the conservative side in this area and rightly so, especially for juniors. Calls for heat policies to be reviewed and dropped back a few degrees make sense to me. Sport is supposed to be fun.
■ The amount of people required to get a team on the park is getting out of hand at local level. Football is the worst offender but other sports are quickly catching up, especially for coaching. The days of the captain-coach are gone and even a playing coach is a rare beast these days. We are used to seeing former AFL players having a kick or coaching in the suburban competitions but are we seeing the next step? Former senior AFL coaches have rarely come back to grassroots football, but this year Rodney Eade will be coaching Balwyn in the EFL while Guy McKenna is at the helm at Beaumaris in the ammos. Football clubs tend to follow each other in most aspects so I expect this to be a new trend in the next few years.
■ The Williamstown Superules team has had its fair share of superstars during its history including Tony Liberatore, Saade Ghazi and Tony Pastore, to name a few. The club will be fielding five sides in 2018 from over 35s to infinity. Training starts February 1 and every Thursday from then on with the season starting on April 8. The club has a big year planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its first premiership in 1993. Contact details are available on the website www.williamstownsuperules.com.au
■ For more than a decade I have enjoyed presenting sport on 1116 SEN in various timeslots, but mostly weekends from when the footy finishes to when it starts again. However, my time at SEN is over as the station goes through an ownership and programming change. That’s the nature of the beast and after 45 years in radio I accept that and move on. This column remains dedicated to local sport so let me know any news.
