Goodbye 2025. Welcome 2026

One of Nikki’s fab photos

I want to write this down in case I forget.

Not the events, they are easy enough to list but the texture of the year. How it felt to live inside it.

2025 was a big year for me.

Stepping away

I stepped away from the Presidency of South Hobart Football Club after seventeen years. That sentence still lands heavily. Not because I regret the decision but because it marked the end of a long season of responsibility. The kind that seeps into your thinking and stays there long after the meetings end.

I am still learning who I am in football without a badge or a title attached.

Ken stepped back too, giving up senior coaching roles after more than fifty years in football. Watching someone who has shaped his entire adult life around the game feel a little lost has been confronting. There is grief in that, even when the decision is right.

We are learning, together, what it means to still belong without being central.

Max left for Melbourne, chasing opportunity and growth in his coaching. That was a proud moment and a tender one. You don’t spend decades building something as a family without feeling the pull when one of you needs to step beyond it.

I am glad he went. I miss him too.

The joy alongside it

The trips away this year were genuinely fun. Nikki came with us and at one point Ken said he felt like he was travelling with two wives. He was constantly fussed over, checked on and looked after.

It became a running joke but there was something quietly lovely in it too.

Those trips were for Australian Championship games, Wollongong, Marconi and Heidelberg. It was fabulous to see other clubs competing in the NPL system and to experience the level they operate at.

The gap is not huge. The football certainly isn’t. The money, perhaps, is.

Those shared moments, away from home, reminded me how much joy still sits alongside responsibility.

Building and sustaining

Ned continued to do an outstanding job as Academy Director, providing consistency, structure and calm leadership. He has been trusted by players, parents and coaches alike and the Academy numbers this year reflect that.

Parents are choosing organisation, professionalism, certainty and child safety for their children and they are prepared to pay for it. That tells its own story about where community football is heading.

Pete Edwards joined South Hobart Football Club and Morton’s Soccer School later in the year, after what he described as the longest interview process he had ever experienced for a coaching role.

His arrival added depth and energy to the program and complemented the foundations already in place.

On the field, the club competed in the Australian Championships. We travelled to watch them play. We hosted powerhouse clubs at home. We welcomed South Melbourne to KGV in the Australia Cup after winning the Lakoseljac Cup.

There were moments when I stood back and simply took it in.

Not pride exactly. Something quieter. A sense of perspective.

Nick won a third Best Player award this year. Three in a row. Watching that level of consistency, professionalism and resilience never gets old. He goes about his football with standards that don’t waver.

He also fielded offers from clubs in Tasmania and interstate. Recognition like that doesn’t happen in isolation. It is earned over time, through work, behaviour and care for the game.

The work and the weight

I also want to acknowledge the Board of South Hobart Football Club. Working alongside them this year has been one of the quiet strengths of 2025.

They love the game as deeply as I do and they carry that love with resilience and care.

Over the past two years we worked relentlessly on our bid for inclusion in the Australian Championships as a foundation member. The volume of work was immense. There were knockbacks, moments of limited support and long stretches where it felt like we were carrying the weight alone.

We can pretend that being knocked back is fine.
We can rally, regroup and carry on.
But the truth is, it wears you down.

There was a familiar feeling too. The here we go again sense of coming close, of almost making it, of being asked to prove ourselves one more time. It exposed divisions in the game that are hard to ignore.

And yet, through all of it, the Board remained engaged, principled and committed. That kind of resilience doesn’t happen by accident. It is earned, collectively, over time.

There was, however, one issue this year that cut deeply. It wasn’t a football issue, but it affected everything. It gnawed away at me and triggered a constant sense of unfairness, of asking, over and over, why is this happening to my club?

It tested my mental resilience in ways I didn’t expect and at times it was genuinely damaging.

Ten years of criticism and blame will do that to a person. Ten years of having to justify your existence, to answer every complaint directed at you.

Continuing as I was became unsustainable.

I’m not ready to name it yet, but I carry it with me into 2026 with clearer boundaries than before.

Scale and momentum

Both South Hobart and CRJFA continue to face the daily challenge of fitting thousands of children onto too few grounds. It is a constant exercise in compromise, goodwill and logistics.

Football is thriving. Participation is strong. Demand keeps growing. The system around it strains to keep up.

I would be remiss not to mention the Hobart Cup. The biggest Junior and Youth tournament in Tasmania (of any sport) and one that still takes my breath away each year.

In 2025 we held our breath over the weather, as always, knowing how much rides on a few days in September. This year it held.

Record numbers entered.
Record numbers attended.
Grounds full from morning to night.
Kids everywhere.
Families everywhere.

It was a fabulous showcase of football and of what is possible when the game grows beyond what can realistically be run as a purely volunteer event.

There are signs of movement. A new building at D’Arcy Street. New lights at Wellesley. Projects that take years to materialise and even longer to advocate for.

They represent progress, even when it arrives slowly.

Looking ahead

Some of my favourite moments of the year are imagined ones, still forming. Sitting in the new clubhouse, hopefully in 2026, having a drink with Murray and looking out over a space shaped by decades of effort and belief.

I remain in awe of those who support the club financially and of those who turn up, quietly and consistently, to do the work that keeps football alive.

The people who make the whole thing function rarely ask to be noticed.

I have written a lot this year. To remember. To make sense of more than twenty years spent inside football, governance and community life.

Writing has become a way of choosing how I stay connected, without losing myself in the process.

As I move into 2026, I feel something I didn’t expect.

Optimism.

Not the glossy kind. Not optimism that ignores structural problems or hard truths. But a steadier sense that change is possible and that I can choose how close I stand to the fire.

So this is my goodbye to 2025.

A year of endings, shifts and recalibration.

And my welcome to 2026.

A year that feels open, lighter and full of possibility.