South West Slopes Soccer is gearing up for another big year in 2025 with Harden, Gundagai, Temora and Coota again playing in the four team comp.
Coota’s Justin Knewstub is the Vice President of Coota Junior Soccer and has been for the last 5-6 years. He said, “I’m also the President of the South West Slopes Soccer Association, the governing body for all of the area.”
With registrations available now, Justin is hoping for another good role up at Coota and at the other clubs.
“We are all going through regos at the moment which close late March, early April. The younger age groups are usually pretty good for numbers, but it’s the older ones that we’ve had the decline in. The Under 13s we have had a pretty stark drop off. The South West Slopes used to have up to 16’s, but with numbers dropping off all over the district we couldn’t keep that going.”
Justin highlighted the issues the code has faced since Covid and the need to keep numbers up across the region.
“We could field Rep teams, but not the normal competition from South West Slopes from Coota, Gundagai, Harden and Temora. Our competition tops out at the Under 14’s as we couldn’t get older players to play.”
“It’s hard to say why. A big one from the Coota side is (and we are the biggest from all the regions, we average about 140, 150 players) a lot of kids around here end up going off to boarding school at about that age and once you get a lot of these youngsters leaving the people drop off. It’s just that age group.”
Justin agreed that at certain ages, player focus can change to other sports and interest.
“I don’t know if they don’t want to play soccer any more, they find other interests. It was something they did as a little kid, but as they start becoming a teenager they are like ‘there’s other things to life’ and they move on. We get a mix of females involved in the older age group soccer and it’s certainly far more males, and there’s some good ones amongst the girls, but there’s never enough to field a team of just girls, it always has to be mixed.”
“Even with our representative teams there’s never just a girl’s team, they always have to play in the boys and be in a mixed team.”
Just a few years ago the competition was stronger and went up to U16s.
“Back a few years ago we used to have up to Under 16’s, but we would have one or two Cootamundra teams and then we would have Temora, Gundagai and Harden all combined, they only had enough players to have those three towns combined to make one team.
The kids weren’t interested any more and it was the same kids playing the same teams every week.”
The solution appears to be more kids entering the sport at a young age and continuing on as they get older.
Coota has enough to fill a 14’s and 16’s that play in the Wagga Comp with the Strikers doing really well.
“When we used to have the 16’s we would get up around the 200 mark for players. Only doing Under 5’s to Under 14’s we usually hover about 130-140, sometimes a bit more.
“We held a gala day on February 26 in Cootamundra and we had 200 kids from local schools attend. We always invite the schools from other towns, but it always just seems to be Coota that plays.
It appears some of the schools aren’t responding to the invite or getting the memo. With the NRL pushing to expand its market share under Peter V’landys they are getting in young at kindergarten and year one level with league tag and up to half a dozen development officers at each gala day. Investment in Soccer in the local areas is left to locals while Football Australia sits on its hands. Something that has to change for the future of the Socceroos and the Matildas.
The world game could do with a boost.
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