By Victoria Stone-Meadows
The Lynbrook Football Netball Club is reaching out for community support to ensure their senior women’s team has the best chance of success in the Southern Football Netball League 2017 season.
The club is running a crowdfunding campaign through the Australian Sports Foundation to cover the cost of babysitting services, so women with kids in the community have the best opportunity to play footy.
The club has started implementing this plan already, and it has been a great benefit to the women on the team, but it needs community support to keep it going.
Kelly Baker plays for the Lyndhurst Lightening and has three kids; twins aged seven and a 13-year-old.
She is playing Aussie Rules for the first time this season, and said she was “absolutely loving it.”
“It’s new, exciting, fresh, and keeps giving me great new things.”
“I have always played other sports, but adding the element of tackling is really exciting; it gets the frustration out like nothing else.”
She said having the childcare option had freed her up to really focus on playing the best footy she can.
“Juggling kids can be an issue,” she said.
“My kids are very active and they would be getting up to all kinds of trouble with no one to watch them, and I can focus on playing, not worrying about what they were doing.”
Ms Baker’s husband works late nights on Tuesdays and Thursdays when she is at training and plays football himself on the weekend, but for a different club.
Having the childcare option at Lyndhurst frees up both herself and her husband to pursue the sport they both love.
Club president Andrew King said the management team wanted to do everything they could to support the growth of women’s football in the region.
“We want to make football as inviting and easy to access as possible for all women,” he said.
“We want women to be able to play football if they want to, even if their partner is working or living apart; we didn’t want the reason for not playing to be they have to look after the kids.”
The club is asking the community to get involved in supporting women’s football as well by helping the club employ a qualified childcare worker for training nights and game days.
Mr King said the idea behind the club providing childcare was about more than just taking care of the kids while their mums and carers played the game.
“We will have someone in place so the women can come to training and game day with the kids if they want, and we will have someone in place to make sure kids are cared for and looked after,” he said.
“We’ll have the childcare worker there after game and after training, so if the women want to socialise that person will still be in place to look after the kids, so our women’s team can play footy and be part of the club culture.”
Ms Baker said she hoped other clubs in the region followed the lead of Lyndhurst and implemented a similar system to give all women access to the sport.
“As a parent and mother, you feel that you are the number one carer in most cases, and you feel like you are locked in the house with young kids sometimes,” she said.
“If more clubs offered this, it would bring a lot of girls out, especially ladies who had babies in their early twenties, who want to get out some frustration.”
Ms Baker urged everyone in the community to support the club’s fund-raising efforts because being able to play in her team meant a lot to her and the other women on her side.
“Lyndhurst is a great club, and they have provided me, as a new player, immense support,” she said.
“Especially being a parent and allowing us to just to fit in; it can be a boys’ club and sometimes you can be segregated in the footy world, but Lyndhurst has been very accommodating a lot of new girls.”
To add your donation and support, the Lyndhurst FNC support women’s sport, head to the Australian Sport Foundation website and search for Lyndhurst or follow this link http://bit.ly/2oXUq2b.
