A league of their own

They may not be the best footballers around. But, in the league for the intellectually disabled, winning is not all that counts. Larry Schwartz reports.

“ALL right. All aboard! Here we go.” The minibus pulls out of the station car park and on to Maroondah Highway at 9.15 Sunday morning, the fellers in the back roaring: “Ringwood ra, ra, ra. Ringwood cha, cha, cha.”
Coach Frank Sullivan, a retired airlines clerk, exhorts his boys from behind the wheel. “We’ve got to wake up the town, haven’t we?” he says.

And the vehicle bearing members of an outer-suburban team that wears Carlton colors, throbs with song borrowed from the Blues: “We are the navy blues. We are the old dark navy blues. We’re the team that never lets you down …”
The minibus chugs round the suburbs collecting players on the way to the Brunswick sporting ground that is the venue to a fooball competition for intellectually disabled players, enthusiasts from their mid-teens to the 40s, and at last with a league of their own.

Though they are as passionate about winning as the next bloke, the real virtue for those whom circumstances have forced to watch others from sidelines is not in victory. Everyone is a winner for having finally been welcomed into the fold.

We stop off outside a weatherboard. “Here’s Andrew, the old skipper,” Frank Sullivan says as the rear door swings open. “Give him a clap.”
A trainee despatch clerk who had been to Kardinia Park the day before to barrack for the Cats, Andrew Kolovaric, 20, once made a suburban side’s reserve team but says: “They always used to tease me a little bit about my slowness.”
By the time we pass Fitzroy baths on Alexandra Parade, the fellers are singing `Old McDonald’. Someone pipes up with lines from the club song. Someone else says: “Shuddup, you sound like a parrot”.

Twenty-two-year-old Adam (“I play ruck, I’m the biggest one”) Law is travelling to the game in a car driven by his mother. He’ll put up with a ribbing today because he has had his hair cut short.

He, too, trained with a local team, “But they wouldn’t give me a game so I came here. I’ve been playing for this club and I’m proud to be here.”
One of the players sits up front with his fiancee. Frank Sullivan tells how a real estate agent reneged on an agreement to rent them a flat because, he said, the owner would not rent out to someone who was disabled.

COMMUNITY misconceptions about their limitations create a “double disability”, says Graeme Baines, who coaches another side, the Chadstone Chargers. “These guys aren’t looking at themselves as having a disability. But they are held back sometimes because the community views them as having a disability.

“It really is a hurdle that some people don’t get over. We must ask ourselves why the greatest sport in this state has never been offered to all that want to play it. This has become a first and really it’s an indictment of our system that this has only just begun.”
In the second of two six-team divisions in the suburbs, most of the Ringwood Blues players are confident as they head off to meet the Broadmeadows Kangas this morning.

The Kangas wear North Melbourne colors. The youngest is Raylene Connell, 15, one of about eight women in the league. Organiser Debbie Mitchell says that, although most have “mild to moderate” disabilities, the Kangas are struggling this year near the bottom of the second division.

The Blues on the other hand go into the Sunday morning match unbeaten in all three games they have played this season. If they win this morning, they will reinforce their place at the top of the ladder.

Adam Law’s voice rises loudest above the hubbub when I ask the players at training about winning: “All I can say, if we make this four wins in a row it will make us confident that we can win the flag.”
“If you win …” I begin.

“Yeah, if we win,” he interjected, “which we probably will.” (This response is greeted by raucous laughter).

Some are more philosophical about the result. “You go out to try and win and you do try to do your best,” says Travis Redfern, 20, accompanied to the game by his father. “If you can’t, well, there’s always the next week.”
Sullivan knows the outcome means a lot to his players. “To the team, it is everything to win; they all get a buzz out of it; they love to win. But, as the coach and administrator, to me the winning and losing are immaterial because we’ve got some guys who don’t get a kick.”
He assesses the disabilities of his players from “as low as 30 per cent perhaps to as high as 90 per cent of the scale of a normal person”.

Assistant coach Peter Kolovaric, brother of team captain Andrew, is impressed by the way each player, realising the others’ particular problem, seems so eager to help teammates.

“The encouragement is just unbelievable. It’s something you just can’t get away from. They give you so much satisfaction the way they encourage one another.”
He says that, apart from the footy, and indoor cricket in summer, there is a social side to the Blues.

“Not many people will accept them and they’re starting to get more friendly with the group. They will get their own crowd and when they go out they’re just fantastic friends.” There have been outings to nightclubs and discos, and a 21st birthday party.

The league is co-ordinated by an organisation called the Football Integration Development Association, which was set up after a Hawthorn Football Club clinic.

One Hawthorn official involved in the 1989 clinic, who saw handicapped players from suburban Melbourne enjoying their first chance to play footy, told a colleague: “Last night, I went home and told my wife what I’d seen in the gymnasium. No sooner had I described everything to her than we both started crying in the kitchen. You should have seen us.”
The Blues have not progressed beyond the semis since they joined the association two seasons ago. Now they are beginning to eye the finals at the end of July.

THE teams in the competition carry the usual monikers. They include: Footscray/Sunshine Underdogs, Werribee Crows, Chadstone Chargers, Karingal Bulls, Keilor Saints and Mitcham Tigers.

“I know these lads like the back of my hand,” says Sullivan, former general manager of Ringwood Football Club, who just the night before was working at its bar in the clubhouse after the seniors’ seventh consecutive victory. “I know their highs, their lows …”
He put it to the players after a recent practice: “I think some of you would like to do the normal things in life that we all do. You go and have your game of football and your social activites, and why can’t you do the same?” That evening coach Sullivan put his players through their paces at kick to kick, handball, marking and picking the ball up off the ground. “Not good at push-ups,” he smiled.

The game is a very slightly modified version of conventional footy, played on a marked off to junior-size ground with nine a side, unless opposing sides turn up with more players (when the rules are varied accordingly). The Blues have 14 today, the Kangas 12. So they play 12 a side with two Blues sidelined for each 20-minute half.

Probably the most significant difference is that players may bounce the ball only once, so as to prevent the better players from getting the ball at one end and running to the other.

Association president Peter Ryan says many of the players have attended special schools. Several have cerebral palsy or Downs syndrome but in some cases the disability is so minor they would be “ready to go on and play metropolitan seconds in another side if they were just given a little bit more care and understanding by their teammates”.

A teacher at a Footscray special school, Mr Ryan shares Frank Sullivan’s interest in broader goals than victory and defeat. He regrets that some coaches still feel winning is all-important: “We really try very hard to make sure that they don’t get carried away with that side of it. I think it’s irrelevant, really.”
It is 10.20 in the changeroom of the Brunswick ground and most of the players are in their footy gear. Frank Sullivan is helping one of the players tie his boots. Andrew Kolovaric is doing sit-ups, teammate Paul Williams is holding his ankles. Others are doing stretches or standing about. They’re obviously pumped up.

At 10.45 am, Sullivan is giving his pre-match pep talk, telling his team to watch out for the big bloke who kicks straight down the centre of the field without fail. Then it’s: “Right fellas, we run out now as one. Now come on!” Down the race they go.

The wind at their backs, the Kangas score first and the Blues realise this is not going to be a walkover. With just 2.1 at half-time, the Ringwood team is a point behind the Kangas’ 1.8. Tempers sometimes flare.

In this division, coaches remain on the field to help players, the most disabled of whom might otherwise not know what to do with the ball. At half-time, the players huddle about their coach. “Fellers, it was terrific. Keep the good work going”.

The association will play a combined team from Bendigo later this year. Each of the 12 clubs was represented in a touring team that played a South Australian side before 44,000 spectators at the recent state-of-origin game in Adelaide. One of the organisers told us of a player so panicked when he received the ball that he neglected to pass and kicked a goal by mistake.

Some players don’t get a touch of the ball during the game; so they do not know the score when they embrace after the game. But, irrespective of individual merit or the outcome, Mr Sullivan makes sure each is presented with an identical trophy at the end of the season.

One of the two to go on in the second half, Robert Courbould, 43, is wearing white woollen long johns beneath his shorts. He lives in a community residential unit at Chirnside Park. Sullivan says Courbould is among those who rarely get a kick. But he still enjoys himself so much that he regularly strolls over at training or a game to say: “Frank, I like you.”
Corbould has a fan in his supervisor, Henny Phillips. “The first time I watched him, he saw a ball coming …” (she re-enacts his impassive stare). “Today’s he’s catching it.” She says he is also a great cricketing enthusiast: “He belongs to one of the local cricket clubs but he’ll never even get a look-in, not even at the nets.

“I just wish that the community would sit up and take note of these guys. What they can do, not what they can’t. It’s so frustrating.”
THE wind behind them, the Blues quickly take command in the second half. “Go, Greg, keep running at it, mate”. Margaret Hay is encouraging her 19 year-old son from the sidelines. “Just go for the ball, Greg. Don’t worry about anything else.”
Her teenager daughter, Sue, is boundary umpire. “These boys just play for the enjoyment of it,” says Mrs Hay, who tells of the sheer pleasure of watching the high fives and embraces as they score.

Margaret Hay is thrilled to see her youngest son getting enjoyment out of the game. “It’s just fabulous,” she says. “Now he just feels that he can do these kinds of things. Before he couldn’t compete with normal boys. But now he can go out and do his thing and there’s no one laughing at him.”
Adam Law’s mother, Meredith, says her son has been a staunch Richmond supporter for a long time and always wanted to play football. When he was 18, he’d trained with the seniors at a football club in the outer- eastern suburbs but was never considered good enough to get a game.

“This has done a lot for Adam,” she says. Now he trains with Ringwood seniors as well. Maybe he would get a game. “But that’s not the main thing,” she says. “It’s given him the opportunity to be part of the community. The football community.”
When the final siren sounds at 11.35 am, the Blues embrace, shake hands with the vanquished Kangas and leave the field, arms interlocked, chanting that, yes, they are “the old dark navy blues”, the team that never lets you down. The final score: Blues 8. 10(58), Kangas 1.9(15).

Assistant coach Peter Kolovaric has detected a change in attitude after one of the first wins this season.

“The thing I noticed which really shocked me,” the 27 year-old bricklayer says. “Last year they won a few, lost a few. This year, I noticed they all came off the ground together and they’re all hugging each other and they’re all just staying there.”
Amid the jubilation in the changeroom, Frank Sullivan stoops to help untie a player’s boots. And congratulate his team. “Fellers, you were great. The back line was sensational …”
Among his duties as coach, before he can unwind by watching the footy on TV this afternoon, Frank Sullivan hastily scrawls a note on a piece of paper while the team minibus is stopped at traffic lights.

He gives it to a player who did not score but has been repeatedly asking how many goals he kicked. The player leaves the minibus with a bit of paper on which the final score is written, along with an assurance that “Steve has played well today”.

THE SUNDAY AGE, 29-May-1994