'You can't play football over Zoom': Community sport in lockdown

Last week, the Victorian Amateur Football Association finally cancelled its 2020 season. It was hardly a surprise. A giant question mark had loomed over its prospects for the rest of the year, the constant companion to that permanently hovering spectre of coronavirus.

There had been glimmers of hope – if restrictions kept easing, the story went, we might get nine or ten games. But the Victorian government’s decision to start locking down individual postcodes was the last straw. The VAFA board met and decided the health risks were too great to play this year.

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In the week since, as the virus slowly closes its grip over Melbourne again, nobody is questioning that decision. But for the two dozen women that I’ve been training with (in appropriately sized groups as per government guidelines) for the last few weeks at Elsternwick Amateur Football Club, the news was shattering. VAFA announced their decision last Wednesday night. Training for Thursday was cancelled, but we all turned up anyway in a kind of daze, pulled out the footballs and started working drills. OK, so we won’t get a game this year. Surely we can still train? Outdoors, in small groups? Would that be so bad?

Our insistence on turning up was a testament to just how important this handful of weeks of training had been to us. The club has been trying to get a women’s team going for ages; hamstrung by lack of appropriate facilities, a couple of years ago Bayside City Council refurbished the club’s rooms at Elsternwick Park to make the venue more inclusive. With that completed, in September last year the club started running clinics for interested women, pulling together a vibrant, diverse and enthusiastic group, most of whom had never had a chance to play footy before.

So the team was raring to go come pre-season training back in March, until the first round of public health restrictions came crashing down on top of everyone’s best laid plans.

Just one of the many distressing effects of the pandemic shutdowns has been the enforced atomisation. Sure, we’re still connected by technology – most of us – but there’s no virtual substitute for team contact sport. You can’t play football over Zoom.

My family has a long connection with the Elsternwick football club. My dad played there as a young man, and a few years ago he became its president. One of my brothers plays there. When Dad started talking about starting up a women’s team I pitched in, even though I was living in Sydney, writing grant applications for the club and helping brainstorm strategy.

I moved back to Melbourne from Sydney at the end of March, with the onset of the shutdowns. In that time, remaining fit took on a desperate edge – on alternate days I ran and lifted weights in the fledgling gym my partner and I cobbled together in our shed. That’s manageable while the sun’s still shining, but it becomes harder and harder to motivate yourself as the cold closes in. There had also been no opportunity to restart my dormant social life in my new (old) home. So the easing of restrictions in June and the opportunity to start playing sport again – to join this new team that I’d already contributed to building and to make some new friends – was like a bright ray of sunshine through the midwinter dark.

It’s hard to overstate just how much of a backbone amateur sport still gives a community. It’s not just the players who get along to training twice a week and then turn out to play on weekends; there are volunteers at all levels of a club, from the board overseeing governance and management to the friends and family members who operate the canteen on game day.

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Clubs also tend to operate on very thin margins, subsisting on subscription payments from players and fundraising efforts throughout the season. When there are no games, there are no subs, but the electricity bills at the club house still need to be paid. And the restrictions on social activity coupled with the massive strain on businesses means a huge gulf in the space where fundraising opportunities used to be. At the start of the year, many teams had put downpayments on necessary kit for the season that never came. Elsternwick, for example, had just forked out cash for uniforms for a women’s team that still hasn’t had a match yet – and won’t until next year at the earliest. Finding creative ways to fundraise through this next wave of economic shocks, to literally keep the club running so that it’s there to help us all return to some semblance of normality after the crisis eases, will be a huge challenge.

As the days roll on, the number of cases in Victoria climbs, and we stare down another six weeks confined to our houses, the concerns of things like community sport seem small. But in a time of increasing social alienation and unprecedented change, small things can take on incredible emotional resonance. I felt such unexpected buoyancy and elation from those few weeks of training, and the sense of solidarity and community that came from being involved in the club – just for a moment. It was the first time in months that I truly felt part of the world. And it will be months until I have the opportunity to feel that way again.