RIP The Volunteer

National Volunteer Week Feels Slightly Absurd

Today is the final day of National Volunteer Week.

Which honestly feels slightly absurd in modern football.

We celebrate volunteers while simultaneously building systems that are slowly crushing them.

This week I met with Michele from Football Tasmania Wise on CRJFA business. Michele is a wise, experienced woman who has spent 15 years working in football administration and our conversation kept circling back to the same thing:

The same tired people are now holding entire clubs together.

In many community clubs, if two or three key volunteers walked away tomorrow, the entire operation would wobble.

Not dramatically.
Quietly.

One exhausted volunteer at a time.

The Club Culture We Used To Know

Gone are the days of dad playing senior football while mum worked in the canteen and the kids kicked a ball behind the goals until dark.

Football clubs once felt like extended families.

People stayed all day.
Children grew up at grounds.
Parents naturally drifted into helping because they were already there.

The club was part of life.

Now football often feels like another tightly scheduled appointment squeezed into an already impossible week.

Drop the child off.
Pick them up.
Rush to the next thing.

Not because people are selfish.

Because modern life is expensive and exhausting.

Children once grew up belonging to clubs.

Now many simply attend them.

And that matters because belonging creates volunteers.
Consumption creates customers.

Maybe Grassroots Was Never Quite The Utopia We Pretend

I write a lot about grassroots football like it is some kind of warm community utopia.

The canteen.
The committee.
The volunteers.
People helping because they love the game.

And yes, at times it absolutely felt like that.

But lately I have found myself looking back differently.

Twenty years of volunteering.

Twenty years of meetings, emails, politics, organising, stress, weekends and responsibility.

And honestly?

I am not even sure how I feel about it anymore.

And no, this is not the point where I ask people to say “thank you for your service” or tell volunteers how wonderful they are.

Plenty of people have done extraordinary things for their clubs over decades.

That is not really my point.

My point is that community sport has quietly become dependent on a relatively small number of people carrying extraordinary loads for very long periods of time while everyone else simply accepted that the work would somehow keep getting done.

And eventually you look back after twenty years and wonder:

Was this actually sustainable?

Did people genuinely value the work?

Or did many simply think:

“Great. Someone else is doing it so I don’t have to.”

That is the uncomfortable question sitting underneath community sport.

Because football often romanticises volunteerism while quietly relying on the same people over and over again until they burn out.

Community sport often relied on a relatively small number of people carrying extraordinary workloads while everyone else simply enjoyed the product.

And the work of volunteers is often only truly noticed once it stops being done.

Two Incomes And No Spare Capacity

Housing costs have exploded across Australia.
The cost of living keeps rising.
For many families, two incomes are no longer a choice, they are survival.

And when both parents are working, spare time disappears.

By the time families juggle work, school, shopping, cooking, traffic, bills and simply trying to survive their own week, there is very little left in the tank.

Volunteerism once relied on spare capacity.

Modern life has stripped much of it away.

Football Quietly Became A Job

At the same time volunteering itself has changed completely.

Once upon a time you simply helped.

Now you onboard.

Now volunteers need:

• Working With Vulnerable People checks

• Child safety training

• Online induction modules

• Governance understanding

• Risk management awareness

• Registration systems

• Incident reporting

• Parent communication

• Emails

• Committee meetings

And yes, most of these reforms came from genuine failures, risks or tragedies. None appeared from nowhere.

Child safety matters.
Good governance matters.
Safe environments matter.

But collectively they are creating something football is refusing to properly confront:

We are asking volunteers to operate inside increasingly professionalised systems without professional support.

Some volunteers are now effectively doing semi-professional administrative jobs after full days of work.

Registrars.
Treasurers.
Ground coordinators.
Junior convenors.
Presidents.

Many community clubs would simply collapse tomorrow if those people stopped.

The Risk-Reward Equation Has Changed

There is another shift too.

People are frightened of getting it wrong.

A volunteer coach or committee member now worries:

• What if I breach policy?

• What if a parent complains?

• What if I miss a compliance step?

• What if I say the wrong thing?

• What if I get accused of something?

The joy of helping has slowly been replaced by the fear of making mistakes.

The risk-reward equation of volunteering has changed completely.

The Emotional Exhaustion Nobody Talks About

Many volunteers now carry constant low-level guilt.

Guilt for not helping enough.
Guilt for missing messages.
Guilt for saying no.
Guilt for stepping down.

The emotional load is enormous.

Most are not leaving because they stopped caring.

They are leaving because they are tired.

And quietly, many long-term volunteers no longer feel valued.

They feel utilised.

The Irony Nobody Wants To Admit

I have sat through volunteering workshops in Tasmania with volunteers from my own club spending hours trying to work out how to recruit more volunteers.

Think about that for a moment.

Volunteers volunteering their time to attend workshops about how to convince other exhausted people to volunteer their time.

The irony is almost unbearable.

You sit in rooms watching glazed eyes slowly drift toward the exit while everyone talks about “engagement strategies” and “volunteer pathways” and “building capacity”.

But deep down most people already know the truth.

The problem is not recruitment strategy.

The problem is capacity.

People are tired.

Modern life has consumed the spare hours community sport once depended on.

You cannot endlessly professionalise volunteer roles while simultaneously wondering why fewer people are putting their hands up.

At some point the entire model starts collapsing under the weight of its own expectations.

And quietly, I think many people in community sport already know it.

The Endless Performance Of Community Sport

This week, clubs all over the country posted nicely framed graphics thanking volunteers.

And ironically, there is a good chance some exhausted volunteer stayed up late making those graphics because it felt like something the club should do.

The irony never really stops.

And to be clear, this is not mocking those volunteers.

Quite the opposite.

It is recognising how modern community sport now operates through an endless stream of emotional and administrative labour that somebody always has to carry.

Female Football Week.
Volunteer Week.
Mental Health Round.
Respect campaigns.
Social media expectations.
Acknowledgement posts.
Community obligations.

Again, none of these things are bad in themselves.

But collectively they become another exhausting layer of work added onto people already struggling to keep clubs functioning.

The expectation to constantly publicly demonstrate values has itself become another volunteer task.

Sometimes I think community sport now spends almost as much time performing community as it does actually living it.

And underneath it all are the same tired people quietly making sure everything happens because they feel responsible.

That feeling of responsibility is powerful.

But it is also dangerous.

Because eventually responsibility turns into obligation.

And obligation slowly turns into exhaustion.

The Disappearance Of Belonging

Clubs used to be social centres.

People stayed after games.
Shared meals.
Watched senior football.
Had a drink together.
Children played together for hours.

Now grounds empty quickly.

Because everyone has somewhere else to be.

Volunteers were once created by connection and belonging.

Modern life increasingly runs on convenience and efficiency instead.

Uber.
Food delivery.
Streaming.
Online shopping.

Sport is now one of the last parts of society still heavily dependent on collective unpaid effort.

And the tension is starting to show.

The Warning Sign Michele Mentioned

One thing Michele mentioned stayed with me.

She spoke about one of the biggest Little Athletics centres stopping because there were simply not enough volunteers left to run it.

That should terrify every sporting organisation in Australia.

Because when one of the biggest Little Athletics centres can no longer survive because there are not enough volunteers, this is no longer isolated burnout.

It is systemic.

The same warning signs are appearing everywhere:

• empty committee rooms

• clubs begging for team managers

• difficulty recruiting referees

• the same six people doing everything

• burnout hidden behind smiles and duty

Community sport is slowly leaning harder and harder on fewer and fewer people.

That is not sustainable.

The Invisible Labour Behind Junior Sport

If parents could actually see the amount of work required just to put teams onto a field every weekend, they would probably understand that community sport offers extraordinary value for money.

Fixtures.
Registrations.
Ground bookings.
Uniforms.
Insurance.
Lighting.
Referees.
Equipment.
Wet weather plans.
Communication.
Compliance.
Scheduling.
Safety.

Most of it is done quietly by volunteers who simply love their clubs and want football to happen for children.

Parents often look at fees and wonder where the money goes.

The real question is this:

What would those fees look like if every volunteer role suddenly had to be paid?

The User-Pays Future

At Morton’s Soccer School we employ more than 50 casual staff, many of them young.

They are not there because they feel virtuous.
They are not there because they want the emotional reward of volunteering.

They are there because it is work and they are being paid.

And maybe that is not some terrible cultural decline.

Maybe that is simply where modern society is heading.

People increasingly expect labour to be compensated.

Time has become too valuable.
Life has become too expensive.
And goodwill alone no longer sustains large sporting organisations the way it once did.

That may sound cold.

But honestly, I think much of community sport is already drifting in that direction whether we want to admit it or not.

If volunteering keeps collapsing, sport will eventually move fully toward user-pays systems.

Not because clubs want it to.

Because they may have no alternative.

If people no longer volunteer, clubs will either:

• reduce what they offer

• or pay people to do the work

And when that happens, costs rise sharply.

Parents stop belonging to clubs and start consuming them as services.

Community becomes transaction.

The Real Crisis

Football talks endlessly about participation numbers.

But perhaps the real crisis in community sport is not participation.

It is labour.

Because children can only play if somebody is still willing to organise it.

The future of community sport may not depend on how many children want to play.

It may depend on whether anybody is still willing to run it.