Taroona FC’s impact on Tasmanian football is stretching far beyond having one of the state’s most picturesque venues.
A 17 per cent increase in participation this year has seen the Kelvedon Park outfit named Football Tamania’s Club Changer club of the month for March.
A pioneering approach to female participation combined with expanding junior and youth set-ups have left Taroona in the unusual position of switching focus towards attracting more men.
A mainstay of the Women’s Super League under coach Riley Pitchford, the club also competes in the Women's Southern Championship (under Kelsey Allen and Chloe Williams), the Men's Southern Championship (Diego Atterbury) and SC Reserves.
Founded in 1978, the club states on its website: “We encourage football development at all levels and expect excellence on and off the pitch.”
Technical director Holly-Lace Ayton said the philosophy appears to be working with the club doubling its number of social teams this year and expecting to field more than 30 teams involving about 400 players across all levels and age groups.
“We’ve had a good look at the structure of how we get people involved in the club,” she explained.
“We’ve done a lot to improve the quality of our skills training program and making sure that fits with the needs of our community.
“We’ve had a big focus on improving the quality of our coaches and coach education and development. We’re getting to a point where we have seven qualified C or B diploma coaches in the club, which is massive for us.
“We are a high performance club in the way we provide opportunities to play WSL, but we also have a high-performance mindset in the Southern Championship.”
Despite a relatively small catchment area, Taroona has become one of only four southern sides in the WSL and attracts many players from the Hobart area.
“Over the years we’ve always been progressive in what we provide for female participation,” Ayton said. “We were one of the first clubs to provide female-only options and programs, a lot of our coaches are females and we have a lot of females on our committee. So if anything we’re now refocusing on increasing and improving the quality of our male participation and now that we have the female participation, our focus is on creating winning teams.”
The club has focused heavily on internal communication, creating coordinator roles for youth, junior and social competitions, and has reached out to schools to attract players, particularly those transitioning into high school.
“We focused on improving the way we communicate and part of that was breaking down all the roles within a club and getting people on board,” Ayton said. “So everybody is sharing the load of what we’re doing and we’re making sure that every person involved with the club feels like they know what’s going on.”
She said the prospect of joining the men’s statewide league is sometimes discussed.
“The next step for us is to do a refreshed strategic plan. Through that, we want to be able to identify, is that something we want to aim for as a club?”
The support of president Sam Johnson and predecessors including Mark Painter have been pivotal to the club’s development, along with its photogenic home ground overlooking the Derwent complete with recently-upgraded facilities.
“It is one of the most stunning locations and now we can say that we have one of the best grounds in Tasmania,” Ayton said.
“It’s a very young club in terms of the people involved and we have a very progressive mindset rather than sitting still and saying ‘this is what we’ve always done so we’ll keep doing it’, we are always workshopping what is new and what is next."
Image: Taroona youth players. Picture: Zyla Williams.