Sunshine Heights board believes the Dragons belong in Division One, regardless of whether the senior competition is split in three. 671951 Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
BY MICHAEL ESPOSITO
IF the WRFL decides to split the senior competition into three divisions, Sunshine Heights will fight tooth and nail to stay in top division.
The Dragons, along with North Footscray, are in danger of being demoted to Division Two if a proposed restructure goes ahead.
The WRFL has for the second year in a row put the restructure to a club vote. The restructure would involve cutting the Division One competition to eight teams, meaning Sunshine Heights and North Footscray would go down to second division and Deer Park would go up.
The proposal was rejected last year and is likely to be rejected again, but if it does get passed, Sunshine Heights will argue that it is entitled to stay in Division One, with North Footscray and Deer Park the teams that should be going down.
Former coach and football operations manager Michael Grima said heading back to Division Two would have devastating consequences.
“Our club’s 100 per cent adamant that we want to stay in Division One. We’ve got no intention of going back to Division Two. It won’t help us, it will send our club backwards,” Grima said.
Grima said his club’s search for a new coach, a position he stood down from at the end of this season, has been hampered by the uncertainty about which division Sunshine Heights will be competing in next season.
“We’re finding it difficult to recruit players, and this is the second year in a row this has happened. All the talk of the divisions leaving it so late, means that we’re actually falling further and further behind,” he said. “We’ve fought as hard as we could to get into a position we’re in now, and we think we’re right at the point where we’re able to take a few steps forward and moving us back a division would put our club back 10 years.”
Grima said the league should appoint someone to empower the bottom three Division One teams and the top five Division Two teams with the same club management knowledge that teams such as Albion and Spotswood possess.
“What they really need to do is appoint a person to go to clubs at the bottom end of Division One and the top five of Division Two and show them how to structure up their match payments and explain to them where they should get their revenue from.”
North Footscray would have less clout to lobby for staying in Division One as the club finished ninth this season.
The Devils’ newly-appointed president Ashleigh Guest said his club could be competitive in Division One, and cutting it back to eight clubs would only widen the gap between the haves and have-nots.
“No matter how many teams you have there is always going to be a gap between the top team and the bottom team, this happens in all sports at all levels,” Guest said.
“Having less teams just means clubs will spend more money to make themselves even stronger. That would then make the gap from Division One to Division Two impossible to make for other clubs.”
