New YVMDFL chief executive Stephen Walter.By Casey Neill
THE Yarra Valley Mountain District Football League (YVMDFL) has a new CEO for the 2008 season.
League president Tony Mitchell said Monbulk resident Stephen Walter was “well placed to lead the YVMDFL to even greater heights”.
An accountant by trade, Walter has an extensive background in banking and finance.
He was retrenched by the National Australia Bank three years ago after 20 years and found himself working with an accountant in Upwey.
“The accountant I worked with was involved with football and this job became available so I put my hand up to apply for the job and I got it,” he said.
Walter also has over 20 years of experience in sport administration within the local community.
He has served as president of the Ferntree Gully and District Cricket Association and the Monbulk Cricket Club and was on the regional cricket council that covered the Yarra Valley and Mountain region for several years.
“So I’ve been basically on either club committees or executives for quite a long time,” he said.
Walter said being unfamiliar with the league and its teams is a big advantage.
“I’ve come in fresh,” he said.
“I can see things for how they are because there’s no history with the organisation.”
He said there is “a fair bit of overlap between cricket and football”.
Although there are a few key differences, Walter said football is essentially no different to any other sport.
“The key to this role is actually dealing with people and how you resolve issues and how you relate to people,” he said.
“I see my job as partnering all those clubs and different people to make sure that we’re all trying to achieve the same end result.”
Walter plans to tackle the issue of retaining junior players in the senior ranks.
“It’s important that clubs don’t see juniors as a cost to their club,” he said.
“If you don’t have juniors you don’t have a future so we need to do everything we can to promote junior participation and encourage them to stay on.”
He said it is important for senior clubs to build relationships with junior clubs and will put strategies in place to keep juniors playing.
Dandenong Ranges Junior Football League has ties to the YVMDFL but is a separate organisation.
Walter said there has been some discussion that there would be a number of administrative benefits if the two associations were to merge, but that such a move is “a way off”.
“It’ll take a bit of time but at the end of the day we’ve got to put down a plan and see what the pros and cons are and if it all stacks up then it’s something we should do and if it doesn’t then maybe we look at doing things differently,” he said.
Walter wants to lift the profile of the league’s netball competition.
“It’s been very much a football dominated organisation and netball has just started in the last few years,” he said.
“They’ve started to have netball clubs as part of the club, and I think a lot of country football used to be like that years ago and then it went away and now it’s coming back.”
He said in the past a lot of male dominated sports have not been as family friendly.
“That’s really changing, it’s really improving, but in some areas they can improve even further and netball can really help in that regard,” he said.
Walter plans to include the word netball in the league’s official title to “really make the full switch in terms of really embedding netball as part of the whole organisation”.
He plans to hold a competition for primary school students to come up with a name for the association.
The league will pick one and the winning school will get a prize of footballs and netballs.
“I’m going to engage the community,” he said.
He said the league puts out a community service.
“If you can be competitive and get a flag along the way that’s fantastic but at the end of the day we’re providing a service for our community and that’s just so important for everyone,” he said.
The YVMDFL is the second largest football league in Country Victoria with two 10-club divisions, a netball team affiliate for each side, and an under 18s competition.
Although the league has lost South Belgrave to the Eastern Football League, it will welcome teams from Kinglake and Yea for the 2008 season.
“It’s one of the few organisations from what I understand that’s actually growing,” Walter said.
Walter replaces Ben O’Brien.
O’Brien was CEO for the past five years and has taken a role with the Victorian Country Football League (VCFL).
