Cheers to sports mums

The autumn chill in the air brings a strange phenomenon to many houses across the 2515 area. It is the start of football season and now soccer, NRL and AFL jumpers cover many a Hills Hoist in the region.

All clubs have hardy volunteers who take home the jumpers every week after games to ensure that they are ready for the following week.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of any local sporting organisation and there are thousands of stories of what locals have done for their clubs: presidents, committee members, coaches, water carriers (pre-Covid) and tuck shop people who all give up hours of their time for little recognition. Their only reward is seeing their kids out having fun with their friends.

As we celebrate Mother’s Day in May, it is great to see so many women take up roles that we once considered “men only”. We now have women as presidents, coaches, assistant coaches and runners. Men and women share canteen, cleaning and team manager’s duties, yet the barbecue seems to be the last bastion of male domain.

I remember when I started playing football as an eight-year-old in Melbourne’s western suburbs, the club had this really nice old lady, “Ma Baker”, who ran the tuck shop. She would always greet you with a lovely smile and “How did you go today, love?” Win, lose or draw you could rely on being called love, darl, sweetie or young fella as you went up for your post-match pie. Us young scallywags would always sing the Boney M song Ma Baker and she would laugh as if it was the first time she’d heard it.

One mum would fill up a bucket with warm water and add her home concoction of what smelt like Pine O Cleen and metho. Her husband would soak old towels that looked like something from a WWI museum in the bucket and go around wiping each boy’s face, whether it was muddy or not. The stinging sensation and the fact the water would be cold after the first quarter did not dampen the enthusiasm of the hard face-wash.

At the Tigers a couple of years back, a mother volunteered to do all the fitness and warm-up work with the players. When the team came back from a record 25-point deficit at three-quarter time to win the grand final, one of the factors was the fitness training she had done with the boys.

Every Mother’s Day the kids would always put in a special effort in their Sunday morning games and ask, “When is Children’s Day?” Nearly every mum would say, “That is every other day!” We would gather the Auskickers (Under 8s) after the game and give them a Freddo frog and say: run up to your mum, give her a big hug, say happy Mother’s Day and give her the Freddo. The kids did run and hug their mums, but somehow the chocolate treat never found its way to the intended recipient.

So, on Sunday, May 9, as the mums of the Illawarra enjoy their breakfast in bed (a cold cup of tea, burnt toast and an egg that tastes like it has been boiling since the night before) and unwrap a gift from the school’s Mother’s Day stall, we hope they enjoy the one day a year that is not “Children’s Day”.

Visit the Northern Districts Tigers website at www.ndafc.com