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Canberra Today 22°/26° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Bear facts or how the girls saved the footy club

Player development co-ordinator Angela Donaldson, left, and club president Nicole Bain, right, and a sleuth of North Canberra Bears at training. Photo: Lily Pass

IN 2018, Nicole Bain and Angela Donaldson took over leadership at a touch-football club, the North Canberra Bears.

In their first season, club president Nicole and player-development co-ordinator Angela managed to scrape together enough players for one team.

This year, the North Canberra Bears have 23 teams playing socially and competitively.

“The husband and wife who were running the club originally moved away, and the club dropped right off. Now we’re rebuilding it again,” says Angela.

“The club’s been around for about 25 years. Nicole and I just thought it was an opportunity for us to bring our own girls into the sport, and try and keep the club alive.”

Through encouraging the community to give it a try, and encouraging their daughters to bring friends along, Nicole and Angela have seen the club grow back from “taking a flailing” to “a healthy participation”.

“We’ve got about 220 or 230 players now, and 30 or 40 volunteers,” says Nicole.

As ex-players themselves, the North Canberra Bears held a special place in Nicole and Angela’s hearts.

“We didn’t actually anticipate it growing as big as it has. I think if you do the basics and you do them well at the grassroots community level, it just grows from there, and we’ve remained friends fortunately,” says Nicole.

“What’s kept me in it are the connections and friendships with the people that started all of this. I wouldn’t be here if Nicole and the girls weren’t,” says Angela.

And Nicole and Angela are happy to see friendships growing between the club’s younger players.

“The girls are starting to organise dinners now. Soon they’ll be organising weekends away and it’s been the best thing to see. We’ve gone on to have all our babies together,” says Nicole.

One of the players, Luci Wilson, 16, says she’ll keep playing for as long as she can.

“I got into it through friends, and I realised touch is the one sport I really want to focus on and that’s because of the community,” she says.

And, Luci says Canberra’s touch-football scene is doing well for girls.

“Having female coaches to coach young women I think is important because there are some challenges and tricky situations in managing groups of girls,” says Nicole.

“We role model to them and we hope through seeing us, they go on to put that back into the community. If you want to live in a fun, positive and healthy community, you’ve got to get behind creating it.”

Nicole says she’s conscious of a sports dropout rate for girls as they get older, and is putting steps in place to prevent that.

“Sport is so competitive now. It funnels into this top group of the elite players and then the rest of the players sometimes get left behind. They just think it’s too hard and they stop playing sports anymore,” she says.

“But we have mums playing in teams and ex-players playing with the young girls so just knowing the players can get a run every season helps.”

Angela says players have the opportunity to just play for fun.

“It doesn’t have to be leading to a representative level. There is an option if they do want to, but they can still come and play with their mates just for fun,” she says.

In giving the girls in the club more responsibility, Nicole and Angela have found that it encourages them to continue playing.

“We bring them into the club and when they reach a certain age we give them responsibility. Someone becomes a team captain, someone is put in charge of organising a team and some people are put in charge of coaching the juniors.”

And they want to be clear, boys are welcome to play for the Bears, too.

“We don’t want to be seen as a club just for girls, that’s why we’ve really done a focus this last year to push those boys numbers up as well.”

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Ian Meikle, editor

Lily Pass

Lily Pass

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