The future is high on the agenda

By Nick Creely

After making the announcement back in mid-June that they will join forces with the Narre South Lions Junior Football Club moving into the future, St Francis Xavier O.C Football Club president Wayne Delaland hopes to establish an under 19s side next season.

The X-Men – currently playing in the VAFA – and Lions are now coming together as one, creating a senior pathway they hope can bring sustained success and help build the club’s image in the south-east region.

“The first thing is, we’re not seeing it as a merger as such, it’s more of an alliance, and it’s really just a pathway,” Delaland said.

“As a senior club, we’ve always struggled to have a junior link apart from the kids that go to the school – we’re in a pretty powerful corridor of football, it’s pretty hard for us to get youth from Beaconsfield or Narre Warren areas, so for us, it provides us with a building base.

“We’ve now got kids that can lead into became St Francis players in the future, and the Lions now have a senior pathway – instead of the kids going to a club with three or four under 19s, and those kids can’t squeeze into senior football, and may be lost to the game all together, we’re giving them a path.”

Delaland said that both the Lions and X-Men have been welcoming to the change, and is confident they can build something special.

“We want to build a great culture –we’ve been at Strathaird Reserve for about a month now, and we’ve got juniors sticking around to watch, and the Under 17s Narre South Lions are training with us on a Tuesday night, so they get a taste of senior football,” he said.

“It will nurture a young group, and for us – in terms of our future planning – it gives us a chance to really build an under 19s next year, and they’ll become our senior players in the coming years.”

After carefully looking at different options into how the club can build its reputation as a destination club in the south-east, Delaland said aligning with a junior club was a no-brainer.

“It has been on our agenda for a while, but not exactly with Narre South – we’ve looked at other clubs to align with, and we’ve looked at potentially moving to another oval, just to build our brand as well, and unfortunately because we’re not a big brand name in the corridor, we’ve been unsuccessful in that,” he said.

“Once we found that Narre South is interested in forging a senior pathway, we knew the timing was right and we moved quite quickly.”