RECORD FEATURE: EWK HAWKS

“Kenny Reynolds mows that footy oval twice a week – him and Sonny Peace,” East Wagga-Kooringal president Steve Absolum says of the newly-irrigated Gumly Oval.
“They’re like our professional  grounds staff. It’s like their little baby, the watering system. So Sonny and Kenny mow that oval twice a week.”
Somewhere buried under those couple of sentences is the essence of what the Hawks are, and want to be…
Improvements in infrastructure. Volunteers to do the groundwork, literally. An atmosphere that encourages people to want to be involved. And a football team that wants to repay them the only way they know how – with success.

‘Like a rolling stone’ might as well be East Wagga-Kooringal’s motto. Not the rock star variety but the old proverb – the gathers-no-moss variety.
Keep moving. Stay current. Get better.
It’s like a mantra.
Ask coach Gavin McMahon at this year’s season launch what he’s most looking forward to about 2016 and he’ll tell you:  “Just the continued improvement in our footy club, really.”
Talk to Steve Absolum and it’s the same – if you’re standing still you’re going backwards, he reckons.

It was fitting that veteran Hawk and former coach Chris Jackson was heavily involved in the new sprinkler system. Quite apart from his expertise in that business, being there to oversee a well-supported working bee gave Jackson a chance to reflect on where the club is at six years after he came back to coach.
“I work in the irrigation game – we worked hard on getting the right things and how we set it up,” Jackson says, estimating he and Lindsay Gillard put in 100 hours of preparation and then had no problems finding the manpower to help finish the job.
“It was pretty much coordinating a day when we could get a heap of blokes out there to help. It was a big task but we organised it well, all the power went in, and it’s running like a dream.”
He could’ve been talking about the club as a whole.
 “When I took over the coaching role (in 2010), it was more just to get the stability… I enjoy coaching but having a coach there for three or four years was more important for building the culture and the club than just going wham-bam for one or two years.
“We had to really build something. Right now we’re in a good spot.
 “We’ve got depth in the club, we’ve got good people coaching – Luke Adams in the twos and Gavin (McMahon) taking control of first grade, it’s worked really well for us to be a successful organisation.”
McMahon has always been at pains to praise the work done by Jackson before he arrived. But he’s been instrumental in continuing the development and encouraging a culture of professionalism at East Wagga-Kooringal.
“I’d done as much as I could at the time and Gav’s taken it to another level,” Jackson says.
“He’s very direct in what he wants from his club. He leads from the front and everyone loves playing underneath him, that’s for sure.
“And we’ve got a good committee and they’re all working together. That’s what you want. The people in control of the club are all one direction – about making the place better for families and players.”
Jackson laughs about the fact that when he started there were only a couple of blokes with kids around and now “there’s hundreds of them running around, it’s great!”
Steve Absolum was once a little kid running around the footy club. He was watching the Hawks as a two-year old when his dad was playing. The current ‘baby boom’ though is probably less about how many footballers and netballers have kids and more about the atmosphere at the footy.
“We’re doing our best to make it a family club,” Absolum says.
“We’ve got a crèche in our hall now. Even our opposition teams comment and they bring their kids in. We’re having a big Family Day there shortly for the kids. We just had a really successful Ladies Day. It’s not all about our footballers it’s about the other people around our club as well.
“You just want to make it a place that people want to be. You want people to wake up Saturday morning excited that they’re going to footy today.”
Absolum jokes that, as president, he sees less footy than he ever has. But he’s dead serious when talking about the responsibility of taking over from Rob Richards and the committee who rebuilt the club into a strong position.
“With winning comes support too,” Absolum says.
“I’ve been at East Wagga when we weren’t winning and trying to attract sponsors and people to come and watch… it’s a long crawl back from that position.
“Back in the 80s, they were a great club but for all the success they had, they managed to fall away. I don’t know why or how or all that occurs but I know it’s a long road back.
“Put it this way, when you’ve got the club back up and successful you’ve got to work twice as hard to keep it there.”
That means infrastructure as well as atmosphere. A new netball court and an amenities block with change rooms and showers for the netballers are next on the agenda.
Absolum acknowledges they need to work closely with their juniors. The Hawks are without under 17s this year, having not had an under 15s team last year to graduate into the senior club and want to make sure they avoid that scenario in the future.
The Hawks goal is to have as many players as possible playing as many games together as they can. The return of Stu Brierty is testament to the club, with the Australian touch football representative saying he did an about-face on his decision not to travel down for a third straight year when he thought about how much he’d been made to feel a part of the East Wagga-Kooringal family.
“The fire still burns and I want to give back to the club that have been so good to me,” Brierty said.
Not that anyone thinks they’re owed anything, other than a commitment to improvement.  As Absolum says:
“Every year it starts a new year and it’s hard work again. You’ve got to get over the losses and start again ’cause there’s no guarantees in footy.”
Keep moving. Stay current. Get better.