Local Para Champions grants are open

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Image Credit: Australian Sports Commision

The Local Para Champions grants are currently open for athletes, coaches and officials aged 12-24 taking part in state, national or global championships for athletes with disabilities.

Launched by the Australian Sports Commision (ASC) to help offset the costs of travelling to competitions, successful applicants can receive $750-$1000 of funding. Funding will depend on each successful applicants’ circumstances:

  • The base grant will provide $750
  • Those travelling 800km – 1999km will receive an extra $100
  • Those travelling overseas or more than 2000km domestically will receive an extra $200
  • Those who live in a regional electorate will receive an extra $50

Applications for the current round of grants will close April 30, 2025. 

Eligibility 

To be eligible for Local Para Champions grants, applicants must be:

– Be turning 12-24 years old in the same calendar year as their championship.

– Be an Australian citizen or have permanent residency and living in Australia.

– Be a participant in an event or competition for disabled athletes that is:

  • An official state or territory event supported by the relevant ASC recognised national sporting organisation (NSO) or national sporting organisation for people with disability (NSOD), or a School Sports Australia member; or
  • An official national event supported by the relevant ASC recognised NSO, NSOD or School Sports Australia; or
  • An international competition as a member of the Australian national team where only athletes with a disability can compete, representing either an ASC recognised NSO, NSOD, or School Sports Australia.

A participant may include anyone who is involved in an official capacity at an event, such as athletes, officials, coaches and depending on circumstances, guides and assistants.

– To be eligible for the grants, participants attending a state or territory event cannot live closer than 125km to their event’s venue and must have a longer than 250km return journey. (Those attending a national or international event do not have to travel a minimum distance.)

– Participants cannot receive a Local Sporting Champions grant to attend the same event.

– Participants must incur out of pocket expenses greater than or equal to the grant they are eligible to recieve.

– Applications must be submitted before the current round of grants close April 30th, 2025. 

– Applicants can receive up to two grants in the same allocation year (3 June 2024 – 30 April 2025) for attending either:

  • Two different international competitions; or
  • One state or national competition and an international competition.

In addition to the eligibility requirements of the grant, applicants must also abide by the terms and conditions of the ASC.

For more information on the Local Para Champions grants, click HERE. To apply for the grants, click HERE.

 

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Regional carnival puts Football West’s Country Pathway in Focus

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Image Credit: Football West. Photo by Football West/Oli Hustwick

Football West’s first State Regional Carnival has done what many federation pathway initiatives promise but do not always deliver: it brought regional players into a central high-performance environment and made them visible on equal terms, at least for a weekend.

Almost 160 players from six Football West Regional Academy zones: South West, Goldfields, Great Southern, Mid West/Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley, were brought to the Sam Kerr Football Centre in Queens Park for the three-day event last week. For the governing body, the carnival is now being positioned as a formal part of its talent identification and development pathway.

Football West general manager of football David Lewis said the carnival had highlighted the standard of regional football and the role country programs continue to play in the state game’s future. He described the event as an “important part” of the development pathway and thanked players, staff, volunteers and families who travelled from around WA to attend.

From event success to system performance

Western Australia’s structural constraint is distance. Regional players face layered costs that metropolitan players usually do not: long-haul travel into Perth, additional accommodation, time away from school and work, and repeated trips if selected into subsequent camps. Those costs are not incidental. They influence who can stay in the system.

That is why the next stage of this initiative matters more than the launch optics. If identified players cannot progress because the second and third steps of the pathway carry prohibitive financial or logistical burdens, then early identification becomes a limited intervention.

In governance terms, the carnival has shifted Football West’s accountability point. The federation has now demonstrated it can convene regional talent at scale. The policy obligation is to show what proportion of those players can be retained and advanced across the following 12 to 24 months, and on what support settings.

Infrastructure is in Place; Distribution as the Issue

The use of the Sam Kerr Football Centre means WA now has a purpose-built football base capable of hosting large-format pathway activity in one location. That removes one of the traditional constraints often cited in state development systems. Once infrastructure is available, attention moves to distribution: who accesses the environment, how often, and under what conditions.

If Football West wants this carnival to function as a durable pathway mechanism rather than a showcase event, several design questions become central. What are the progression criteria after carnival selection? What travel and accommodation support is available for players invited back into metro-based programs? How is regional representation balanced across age groups and cohorts? What protections exist to prevent early dropout linked to cost rather than capability?

A broader shift in Australian pathway policy

The Football West carnival also reflects a wider trend in Australian football administration. Federations are increasingly moving from ad hoc regional scouting to more formal, event-based talent aggregation tied to defined development structures. The logic is straightforward: centralised assessment improves comparability, increases selector confidence, and reduces the chance that players are missed because of location alone.

Yet national and state systems alike continue to confront the same bottleneck. Identification has improved faster than inclusion in later stages. The policy challenge is less about finding players than funding continuity for players whose families absorb higher participation burdens.

Football West does not need to prove that regional football has quality; that case has already been made repeatedly by player outcomes and now by event scale. It needs to publish evidence that regional players can convert recognition into progression at rates that are not materially depressed by geography or household income.

That means performance should be measured against more than attendance and event satisfaction. Over time, the federation will likely be judged on transition rates from regional carnival cohorts into advanced programs, retention across seasons, gender balance in progression outcomes, and the level of practical support delivered to remote participants.

For now, the inaugural carnival can be read as a constructive step with genuine strategic value. It created a focal point for regional talent and signalled administrative intent. Whether it becomes consequential policy will depend on what Football West builds around it next: transparent progression settings, repeatable support, and a funding model that does not turn distance into exclusion.

Football SA Extends Sammy D Foundation Partnership Into Third Year for Violence Prevention Round

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Image Credit: Shutterstock

Football South Australia will run its fifth consecutive Violence Prevention Round in partnership with the Sammy D Foundation from 3 to 5 July, with junior teams again asked to wear blue armbands throughout the weekend.

The arrangement was formalised in March 2022, when Football SA and the Foundation signed a three-year agreement, funded by SA Power Networks, to deliver the Foundation’s Monkey See, Monkey Do program to more than 7,500 junior members across 52 clubs.The program is a 90-minute session delivered by Sammy D Foundation facilitators focused on changing players’ attitudes toward bullying and violence and educating parents and club members about the impacts of inappropriate sideline behaviours, built around the story of Sam Davis, the 17-year-old South Adelaide junior footballer whose death in a one-punch assault in 2008 led his parents to establish the Foundation.Football SA general manager George Georganas and Foundation chief executive Brigid Koenig confirmed the partnership at its 2022 launch, framing it as a mechanism for improving club culture from junior sidelines upward.

The round has run every season since, expanding in 2023 to incorporate the Federation Cup Final at ServiceFM Stadium,a weekend Football SA dedicated as the Sammy D Violence Prevention Round alongside the Federation Cup Final Day continuing through the 2024 season,when it was again scheduled as a designated round ahead of that year’s Federation Cup Final and shifting from an early blue tape design to the blue armbands used in 2025 and again this year.

A prevention model funded outside government

The Foundation’s programs, including its work with Football SA, are financed through corporate and philanthropic support rather than recurring government funding. Its rollout with Football SA was backed by SA Power Networks, and separate school-based programs in the state’s Far North have relied on grants from philanthropic trusts.Both the Perpetual Foundation’s Kevin Barnes Gift Fund Endowment and the Fred P Archer Charitable Trust have funded the Foundation’s work in that region.

The State Government’s response to the Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, released in December 2025, commits $674 million over ten years to a 136-recommendation reportstructured around themes spanning structural reform, workforce and community education, crisis response, and establishing a foundation for prevention, delivered by Commissioner Natasha Stott Despojaafter four women were killed in the state within a single week in November 2023. The Commission’s focus on domestic, family and sexual violence is distinct from the youth bullying and alcohol-related violence at the centre of Sammy D Foundation programs, but its response includesan expansion of abuse prevention programs to support behavioural change for people who use violence, alongside prevention and awareness activities aimed specifically at young people.

Separately, the Department for Education’s own violence prevention program, developed after a 2022 ministerial roundtable, has directed a $6 million Safe and Supportive Learning Environments Plan of Action toward schools, afterreported violent incidents in South Australian public schools rose 50 per cent in 2023, with more than 13,000 critical incidents recorded that year. The department has since reportedits first decline in secondary school critical incidents in 2024, a 4.5 per cent reduction from 2019 levels, along with a 7.3 per cent fall in suspensions and a 20.8 per cent fall in exclusions in 2025. It also noted thatviolence in primary schools has continued to rise since the pandemic, and that physical violence against teaching staff, the large majority involving primary-aged students, climbed from 273 incidents in 2021 to 662 in 2024.

Evidence from earlier rollouts

Sammy D Foundation programs delivered through junior sport have previously reported strong self-assessed outcomes. An earlier three-year rollout of a related program through SANFL Juniors, a separate competition to Football SA,reached up to 12,800 young players and their families, with 98 per cent reporting increased awareness of the impact of one-punch violence and 89 per cent reporting they avoided a violent situation because of the program.

A national evidence guide on preventing violence through sport, compiled by Our Watch, notes that69 per cent of Australian children and 87 per cent of adults took part in sport or physical activity over a twelve-month period, while also pointing toa lack of research assessing the effectiveness of such approaches, and the need for more robust evaluation of primary prevention programs within sport settings.

Clubs taking part in this year’s round have again been supplied with blue armbands for junior teams, with Football SA and the Foundation asking clubs to share images from the weekend under the round’s official hashtag.

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