Kyneton president Cello Matricadi says the club is a 50-50 chance to field a senior team in the Bendigo Football League next season, and will wait until the last minute tomorrow to finalise their squad.
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Forty footballers trained at the Kyneton Showgrounds last night – 26 senior players and 14 under-18s.
Seven potential senior recruits didn’t show up and tomorrow night’s training session will be the last chance to get more signatures.
Kyneton will submit its team to the BFNL board tomorrow night and the league will discuss the matter on Friday.
Matricadi was “reasonably confident” the club could get more signatures before the squad was finalised.
“We’re reasonably confident. We’re at 50-50 at this stage to get that side up,” he said.
“We’re going to give ourselves right to the nth date or time, so we’re going to keep working hard in the next couple of days.”
While Kyneton will wait until the last minute for any new recruits, the club will meet tonight to decide its best course of action.
The Tigers have good under-18s numbers and will consider playing some in their senior team.
“That’s an option. Potentially we’ve got up to 30-odd kids playing in our under-18s and there are some guys there that are capable to play seniors,” Matricadi said. “It comes down to commitment from them to put in the effort on the track in pre-season and that is an option we are going to have to decide (tonight) as well.
“Potentially we can get six to eight of those guys playing senior football.”
With strong numbers at all its junior levels, Kyneton is desperate to keep its senior and reserves teams there for the future.
“That’s our aim, our under-18s down to our juniors we’ve got plenty of kids playing football for Kyneton and that want to play for Kyneton, which is fantastic,” Matricadi said.
“The talent pool we’ve got at the moment, if we don’t look after this club now and make sure it’s here for the future, those kids aren’t going to have anywhere to play in the seniors.
“We don’t want to go anywhere and we’re certainly going to make sure we don’t go anywhere, we’ve just got to weigh up that option of what our next step’s going to be if we don’t get a side on the park.”
Matricadi thanked members and supporters for their backing, also saying the local community had rallied behind the club.
“It’s actually being really positive, but a lot of them are actually disappointed as well because they didn’t know how serious it was,” he said.
“In hindsight, late last year would have been perfect to start getting the ball rolling.”
