We’ve got a general thread for the mens and womens comp but a thread for a more general Aussie football issues could be relevant too.
APL governance:
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I thought about starting a thread with just APL/FA stuff after this announcement, but General Aus seems better.
Can’t fault the appointment. Not that i have any knowledge of her, but resume seems legit. TBH better than the Merrick one. I’m still confused as to what his supposed to be doing and what authority he has just in general.
But yea, she seems a good appointment. Hope she has enough time to concentrate on Aus.
Merrick is appointed as a “disruptor”. Get with the program! 
So what is koksal’s wrestling name?
I listened to his interviews, also TNC podcast, and i’m even more confused.
Need some information.
Everyone seems to be guessing, even Merrick himself.
He surely just knows he’s going to disrupt something. I don’t think anyone actually knows what that will be.
What FA needs are lobbyists. They need people to relentlessly push the football agenda at all levels of government to extract much needed funding.
While the participation rate is high, the pathways forward for more talented youngsters require significant investments from their parents into SAP programs and the like. Rather than a big pool of talent to draw from, we’re limited to a smaller pool of talented players who have parents in stronger financial positions.
We need something similar to what the AIS offered, and subsidised enrolments for the kids that are truly talented to benefit from regardless of their parent’s financial situation.
Even at the most basic level, fees for a kid’s “soccer” season are significantly more than other codes.
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That should be the A-League academies.
I agree, but there needs to be something in between. There is a whole country of thousands and thousands of young players and only several academies.
There is a big gap in there for plenty of players to get lost.
Talented players here don’t have a great deal of opportunity.
There is the Northern Inland Academy that play in the Northern NSW League 1 in the 13s and 14s.
Other than that, there is nothing.
I know a couple of kids (16, 17 year olds) who drive down to Newcastle each weekend and play NPL to get their chance, but that’s a massive expense for them and their parents. And to be fair the NNSW NPL isn’t that great.
There are plenty of kids that play up in the Premier Division sides who you can tell are really good but the league here isn’t good enough to develop them.
Every single NPL 1/2/3 team has kids academies in every state, unfortunately most of them are subsidy machines for their top teams.
Exactly, they’re really expensive.
Not really. Works out at about $10 per hour. Quite cheap compared to most kids activities.
My understanding was that they were a few thousand dollars per year, which is a lot of money for a great deal of families. That’s just what I’ve read before in articles and heard in podcasts etc.
We went to sign up our son for Monaro Panthers normal junior teams, not NPL.
They were over $100 more expensive for a season than Queanbeyan city, they pushed that they had a pathway to NPL that justified the extra cost.
I have a friend, who’s an Irish immigrant but his kids were born here. They took him to all sports around northern beaches for years. Football, RL and AFL. Must have cost them so much. Big teams were interested in the kid from all sports. I always ‘pushed’ my mate to try to influence the boy to football.
Swans had him in an academy and were keen to sign him up for future. Today i learned he apparently has signed up for St.George Dragons in RL. I wonder if it is to give the family their moneys back from all those years.
Suffer in ya jocks vfl!
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I’ve seen him outside the old SFS post-match a couple of times. Reckon he’s a SFC fan surely?
The way the AFL treated him is a disgrace. Good to see the football world has welcomed him.
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Was a feature on the big screen at the SFS pretty much every game Delps played.