By Nick Creely
Beaconsfield is the latest South East Football Netball club to formally make its intentions known to join the proposed ‘AFL Greater East’ competition under AFL Yarra Ranges from 2019.
The Eagles’ committee met on Tuesday night and voted in favour of the move after much soul searching done by president Troy Robinson and key figures within the club.
“It’s a massive pressure valve release for us,” Robinson told the Gazette.
“It’s been a frustrating topic for the last 12 months, so to have a resolution allows us to go through the formal application process, and it’s is a massive relief for us.
“We’re excited that we can finally move on to the future now – it was a 99.9 per cent vote in favor of.”
Robinson said that the club did its due diligence and definitely considered moving to the powerful Eastern Football League (EFL), but opted for the Yarra Ranges proposal for one major reason – a factor that overrode everything .
“The key link strategically is that we retained a relationship with netball, and that’s the most underpinning and overwhelming factor for us as a club,” he said.
“We have a very strong relationship with our netball club and that was a massive desire to retain that, and a critical ingredient was to go in a competition that could accommodate both football and netball together.
“We’ve done a lot of due diligence, and were meticulous in how we presented it to our people – we looked at Eastern, and we met with the league a number of times, and we put together a risk matrix to look at the risks and the positives, and at the end of the day they were neutral, but the key lynchpin in retaining netball was the biggest thing for us.”
The club will now meet with Yarra Ranges officials in the coming weeks to start the process of a formal application, but Robinson said the long term future of the club appears to be elsewhere.
“Is it the long term the right choice? Crystal ball, we can’t tell at this point – we have a massive desire to be involved in the West Gippsland competition, that’s our future flavor of choice,” Robinson said.
“We want to pursue that model – we want to play the highway, the Garfields, Nar Nar Goons, the Bunyips, Warragul and Drouin, and we believe there’s a massive opportunity if the AFL gets smart, re-zones and looks at the football model properly.
“We believe that’s still the right option for our football, but it’s not on the table right now, but we’ll definitely be showing interest in the coming years.”
It comes after news that Officer has formally endorsed a transfer to AFL Yarra Ranges and Cranbourne announced its intentions of joining the MPNFL.
