The future of the West Footscray Football Club was on the line at a hastily arranged meeting on Tuesday night.
Last year’s Western Region Football League division 2 runners up had to decide if they were going to take the extraordinary step of pulling the plug on their whole season.
The Roosters got dreadfully close to shutting the doors and still remain endangered, but have managed to buy some time and will field a senior team for their season opener against Albanvale at Robert Bruce Reserve on April 2.
“We had a d-day sort of meeting,” Roosters coach Shane Lucas told Star Weekly. “If the numbers weren’t there, I said to the club they would have to look at their options.
“We got enough players there at the meeting, so it’s all full steam ahead, well as much as we can do. We’ve got about 25 or 30 players at the moment, so we’ll see how it all goes.”
West Footscray endured a mass exodus over the summer.
All players on the list from last season, except for nine reserves players, have moved on.
Compounding the player defections, two coaches have come and gone in the off-season.
Lucas sensed the urgency of the situation for his beloved club and committed to coach only two weeks ago.
“After last year’s grand final, I hadn’t been in contact with the club,” he said. “I was there for two years on the boundary line and had two goes at it and didn’t win, so I thought it was a good time for someone else to come in and have a crack.
“Then I got a phone call two weeks ago to help the club keep the doors open.”
Lucas is a Rooster at heart and could not bare to think of his club withering away.
He started as a player in the under 11s and went on to play in the seniors with his only time spent away from the club being a brief period with Parkside.
Lucas coached the Roosters under 18s and reserves and worked in assistant roles.
In the club’s time of need, he was not going to let it go by the wayside.
“It was a no-brainer in the end,” he said. “If we had the players, I was going to stay there because if they shut the doors and I knew that I could’ve kept them open, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.
“I thought I’d at least have a crack at it and try and build something from nothing basically.”
There will be no pussyfooting around under Lucas’s watch.
He does not simply want to field a team for the sake of providing a team sheet to keep the Roosters name alive.
“I spelled it out to them, it’s all back to old school,” Lucas said. “We train and if you don’t train you don’t play and that means if the captain doesn’t train, he doesn’t play.
“I said, if you can’t train every second week because you’re working, there’s no use in coming here to play because I’m not just going to play people to make numbers up.
“The last thing you want to do is turn into a pub football club because you’ll never get it back if you let it get back to that stage.”
Rebuilding the Roosters culture is the top priority for Lucas.
He said the club had made mistakes in past seasons with the players it recruited and the current players will unfortunately have to bare the brunt of that.
“I said to the players, you’re going to have to have thick skins because for years, we lost two grand finals, but we basically dominated the competition and most of those boys didn’t mind telling the crowd and the opposition how good they were,” Lucas said.
“It’s got nothing to do with you and it’s got nothing to do with me, but we’re going to cop that back this year ten fold.
“As long as we can say our conduct is fine, we can hold our heads up and we all roll up and we all wear the same clothes and we all do a warm up together and it’s still professional, at least we can say we’re doing it all professionally, even if we do lose a game by 50 goals.
“That’s the motto of the year: keep your head up and have pride in what you do.”
If you would like to play football for West Footscray this season, you can get into contact with the club through their official Facebook page HERE.
