Australian Football Skool Director Rolando Navas on the impact of floods in Shepparton

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Shepparton
Images provided by Rolando Navas

Over the years, the Shepparton Cup has been a staple in the football calendar. It is an event which has plenty to offer, not only for young girls and boys but for the community as well.

The town of Shepparton receives enormous economic injection through the tournament and is an ideal weekend getaway for families of all sizes.

The event provides an opportunity for rising stars of the game to participate, with the overall quality of the tournament improving every year. A very successful Goulburn Valley Suns team won back-to-back Cups in the U16 division during 2018 and 2019, which at the time featured Socceroo Garang Kuol, his brother Teng Kuol and Melbourne City goalkeeper James Nieuwenhuizen.

Australian Football Skool (AFS) has been organising events like the Shepparton Cup since 2007 and has seen tens of thousands of great players participate in these events.

Another key Socceroo in Ajdin Hrustic participated in the 2007 and 2008 editions of the tournament, winning all accolades as an outstanding junior player who showed he had the x-factor, even at the tender age of 12.

Unfortunately, due to the unprecedented flooding which had a significant impact in Melbourne and regional Victoria, the Shepparton Cup had to be cancelled for a third year in a row as the facilities and the entire surroundings had been severely damaged.

In an exclusive chat with Soccerscene, Rolando Navas, the founder and a member of the board of directors for AFS, shared some insights from the family-owned business who have been organising the Shepparton Cup for many years now.

He also touched upon their commitment and ways of helping the Shepparton community during this difficult moment in time.

Since the event was cancelled the AFS has partnered with Greater Shepparton Foundation, how did this come together?

Rolando Navas:  The AFS has been hosting the competition in Shepparton for over 10 years now. It started with 40 teams and the highest we have had is 287 teams. We haven’t been able to host the event for a couple of years now due to Covid and the floods earlier this year, so we collaborated with the Greater Shepparton Foundation along with other partners to help the people affected by the floods.

The Shepparton Cup is more than just a sporting event for the community. We teamed up with the foundation in assisting the town to navigate through this unprecedented time and help spread some positivity. This is the biggest football tournament in Victoria, and it means a lot to us.

You mentioned that the Shepparton Cup is more than just a sporting event for the community. What impact does the cup have?

Rolando Navas: It’s massive for the community with respect to attracting over 10,000 people over a weekend. Local accommodations are boosted during the cup weekend, as well as other various local businesses such as sporting outlets, food markets and the surrounding towns of Shepparton due to this influx of people over the course of the event. Grassroots soccer clubs and associations also benefit as they often organise catering for the teams involved and the local food truck businesses also receives a massive boost during the event.

The atmosphere we want to create is more of a carnival type and not just a sporting event. We had planned to have a local expo this year to encourage families who aren’t involved with soccer to showcase their artwork and handicrafts. The cup also provides councils an ideal platform to market themselves and the tourism sectors of Shepparton and its neighbouring flourishes along with creating employment for local contractors, referees and many more to help stage this carnival.

The Shepparton Cup is massive, and we hope to see it return in the near future. What are the things to look out for during next year’s event?

Rolando Navas: There is a massive appetite for the event. I always get asked about it and we continuously look for ways to grow and expand. It is one of AFS’s marquee events and we are working towards getting teams from not just other states but also international teams from New Zealand and Asia to grow the cup into the biggest – not just in the state but also the country. We are also working closely with the council to cater for the demand and have added another venue in Mooroopna which is an eight minute drive from Shepparton. We also want to add more accommodation options for the expected influx of guests for the cup as well. We intend to raise awareness through our other events that run throughout the year and tentatively plan to host the Shepparton Cup in October 2023.  Additionally, we have organised an indoor flood relief futsal event in February 2023 to help the town and bring positivity to the community. Shepparton is our flagship event and we are constantly looking to evolve this further.

AFS also partnered with Shout For Good, how did this come along?

Rolando Navas: They are a great platform to fundraise which doesn’t charge any fee and collects funds sophisticatedly along with being tax beneficial for all donors.  We reached out to them and we plan to work with them for future events. In addition, we introduced them to the Greater Shepparton Foundation which is a charity themselves and all three organisations decided to collaborate to help provide relief for the town.  All the funds being donated go directly to the people who are in need and are recovering from the floods.

You can make a donation via the Greater Shepparton Foundation, which will provide valuable assistance towards the Shepparton Cup and local community.

To donate, please click here.

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Western Strikers Nominated FSA Club of the Month for Equity Outcomes

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Image Credit: Football SA

Western Strikers SC has been nominated for Club of the Month after a period of deliberate structural investment in its female program that is already producing measurable outcomes, and offering a model for how community clubs can drive participation growth through equity-focused planning rather than passive goodwill.

The nomination recognises a program that has moved beyond surface-level commitment to women’s football and into the kind of structural change that determines whether female players actually stay. Improved lighting across training and match pitches, equitable scheduling, extended training hours and dedicated pitch allocation have addressed the practical barriers that clubs often overlook. It’s conditions that tell players, implicitly or otherwise, whether the game was built for them.

 

Leadership as Infrastructure

Central to Western Strikers’ approach is a leadership structure that takes female football seriously as a technical and administrative priority. Women’s Coordinator Michelle Loprete and Technical Director Georgia Iannella, a former Matilda, provide the program with both organisational direction and the kind of visible role modelling that shapes whether younger players can picture themselves progressing through the game.

The presence of a former international player in a technical leadership role at a community level isn’t incidental. It signals to junior players that the pathway from their Friday night training session to elite football is real and navigable, and it gives the club’s coaching staff access to experience and credibility that most community programs cannot offer.

That pipeline is already functioning. Western Strikers’ Under-13 to Under-16 girls teams all qualified for finals in the Youth Premier League this season. Under-15 goalkeeper Sian Schopfer made her debut in the Women’s State League team which is a direct product of a club environment designed to move players upward.

 

The Friday-night model

One of the more quietly significant initiatives at Western Strikers is the scheduling of Friday night women’s matches, with junior girls training beforehand encouraged to stay and watch senior football. The structure is straightforward but its implications are meaningful. Aspiration in sport is not abstract. It’s built through proximity, through watching players a few years older doing what you want to do, in the same kit, at the same club.

The absence of that experience is one of the more consistent reasons girls disengage from football in their mid-teens. When junior female players cannot see where the game goes after their age group, the logical conclusion is that it goes nowhere. Western Strikers’ scheduling decision addresses that directly, at minimal cost, and whose effects are starting to manifest.

 

The Club Changer framework

The club’s participation in Football South Australia’s Club Changer Program has provided a structured framework for identifying and addressing barriers that might otherwise go unexamined. Pitch allocation, training structures and safety conditions are the kinds of issues that accumulate quietly in club environments; not because of deliberate exclusion but because the default systems were built around male participation and have never been comprehensively reviewed.

The Club Changer Program creates accountability for that review. Western Strikers’ ability to project an additional 146 female players over the next three years is a product of planning rather than optimism.

 

Industry implications

Western Strikers’ model matters beyond its own membership. At a time when women’s football in Australia is navigating the challenge of converting a participation surge into sustainable long-term growth, the question of what community clubs actually do with increased interest is among the most consequential in the sport.

Record crowds at the AFC Women’s Asian Cup and sustained national visibility have opened the door. Whether players walk through it and stay depends on whether the club on the other side looks anything like Western Strikers

Football Queensland to celebrate Female Football Week with statewide events, awards and coaching programs

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Brighton women's football motion
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Football Queensland will mark the 2026 Female Football Week with a program of statewide events, competitions and professional development opportunities running from May 8-17, as the governing body continues to push for broader access and representation across all levels of the women’s game in Queensland.

The nationwide initiative, now a fixture on the Australian football calendar, provides a concentrated period of visibility for female participation across playing, coaching, officiating and administration: areas where structural underrepresentation has historically limited both the growth of the game and the opportunities available to women and girls within it.

“Female Football Week provides us with a valuable opportunity to celebrate the contributions of women and girls across our game while continuing to increase the accessibility of football in Queensland,” said Football Queensland CEO Robert Cavallucci. “We encourage our clubs to host their own Female Football Week events and activations for female participants.”

 

Elite Competition Meets Community Access

The centrepiece of Football Queensland’s program is the return of the NPL Women’s Magic Round to Nudgee Recreation Reserve on May 8 and 9, featuring five NPL Women’s Round 13 clashes alongside a Girls United Junior Carnival and family-friendly activations. Each Magic Round game will feature an all-female refereeing panel, a deliberate and visible commitment to developing the next generation of female match officials at a moment when referee shortages are among the most pressing structural challenges facing the game nationally.

A Women in Football networking event will be held on the opening night of Magic Round, bringing together coaches, match officials and administrators. The inclusion of that event alongside elite competition is significant because it positions professional development and community building not as supplementary activities but as core components of what Female Football Week is for.

The Central Coast region will host its own Magic Round on May 16, featuring a Youth Girls game and three FQPL Central Coast Women’s matches, while a Darling Downs Junior Girls Day will take place at Captain Cook Park on the same day, extending the reach of the week’s programming beyond the southeast corner of the state into regional Queensland.

 

Coaching access as a structural priority

Football Queensland will deliver a series of female-only coaching courses around Female Football Week, with clubs also able to express interest in hosting their own. The initiative addresses one of the most persistent barriers to female representation in football administration- its coaching pipeline.

Female coaches remain significantly underrepresented at all levels of the game in Australia, and the barriers to accreditation, including cost, availability and the cultural environment of mixed coaching courses, compound one another in ways that individual ambition alone cannot overcome. Female-only courses create environments where women can develop without those barriers, and their delivery during Female Football Week signals that the commitment extends beyond celebration into structural change.

The Girls United Carnivals, running in both Metro and Far North and Gulf regions alongside the Q-League Schools program at Meakin Park, extend that access to players at the earliest stages of their football journey.

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