NicCarBel
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Griffith, NSW
Griffith driving distance to major cities
A big family affair’
Griffith’s biggest and most successful club is Yoogali Soccer Club, named for the small township on the city’s eastern fringes, towards Yenda.It was formed in 1954 out of the Yoogali Club, one of Australia’s oldest ethnic social clubs, which was where members of Sydney’s Italian community visited for inspiration before founding Club Marconi - though it no longer plays there, having linked up with the Griffith Leagues Club down the road years ago. (That’s why there’s a second team based in Yoogali, known as Yoogali Football Club; the schism between ‘YSC’ and ‘YFC’ would require a whole book to properly explain.)
Yoogali has won 34 first-grade titles in various competitions and regularly hosts teams from Sydney for pre-season matches. Tom Sermanniused to bring the Matildas there regularly for training camps during his first two stints as national team boss and spoke at Yoogali’s season launch at the start of this year.
The Yoogali Club.CREDIT: INSTAGRAM / @OAKBANKBECART
In an alternate universe, where Griffith is, say, two hours’ drive from Sydney instead of six, it’s not difficult to imagine a club like Yoogali climbing the ranks into the old National Soccer League, back when it had promotion and relegation into the state leagues.
Luke Santolin is the current coach of Yoogali’s senior men’s team. His grandfather (or nonno) Noé was one of the club’s founding fathers - the field at the Yoogali Club is named for him - and his father Tony used to coach, and still plays.
“They used to play after church with all the Italian immigrants, and it just grew from there,” Santolin says.
“Like most football club stories, they were doing everything: they were cutting the grass, they were painting the lines, putting the nets up, all that jazz. It was a big family affair back then. My two boys have just started playing now. It’s really all I’ve ever known.”
One of Yoogali’s earliest soccer teams, from the 1950s. CREDIT: YOOGALI SC
Yoogali has an itinerant soccer history, through no fault of their own. Far too big for the local league in Griffith, they have spent decades trying to find somewhere to play, only to be consistently rebuffed. They’ve played in Shepparton (twice), Wagga Wagga, a short-lived Regional Premier League involving other Victorian teams, and most notably, in Canberra.
Invariably, other teams get sick of driving to Griffith and find a way to get rid of them, even though they only have to travel once per year, and Yoogali every fortnight.
“We’ve never forfeited a game. Would you believe that? Never,” says Santolin.
Griffith’s greatest soccer triumph came in 1971, when a team called Griffith United (an amalgamation of Yoogali and Hanwood FC, their fierce rivals) won the league and cup double in the ACT. They played in front of big, boisterous crowds at home, and then jumped on a bus to Canberra every other weekend to fulfil their away commitments. In that team? Not only Tony Santolin and two Paraguayan brothers, Willie and George Wood, but a 16-year-old Walter Valeri, the father of future Socceroo Carl; his father (Carl’s nonno) was one of Hanwood’s founding members. The Valeris later moved to Canberra for work opportunities.
Former Socceroo Carl Valeri (centre) can trace his roots back to Griffith - specifically, to Hanwood FC.CREDIT: REUTERS
“The impossible dream came true,” wrote local newspaper The Area News when Griffith United were crowned champions. “They trained hard, travelled long distance and fought tenaciously to give this town an enviable soccer supremacy. They won and thoroughly deserved it.”
The next year, they were kicked out for administrative reasons.
For the past five years, Yoogali has been competing in Canberra again, as part of the Capital Football system. In 2023, they won promotion to the top-flight NPL - putting them technically just one step below the A-League - and then last year, defied the odds to stay up.
Unlike their opponents, they don’t pay their players - although they do have a long, proud history of sourcing players from overseas, particularly from Scotland. They don’t get paid either, but the club does cover their airfares and finds them work in Griffith (picking fruit, usually, at first) and a place to live.
Some of them never go back.
“I remember as a kid growing up, my grandparents had a granny flat at the back of their house where the overseas players would live in,” Santolin says.
“I remember going to kick the ball with them and then seeing them play for Yoogali on a Sunday. We got to a level where players were calling us, saying they’d heard from a mutual friend or a contact about our club, and how do they come out? You only get that reputation by conducting yourselves the right way. Some of my best friends ever started off as visa players, and now they’ve got three, four kids, a wife, a business, when originally they just came over to kick a ball. So it’s pretty special.”
This year’s team features five members of the Donadel family who, like the Santolins, are Yoogali royalty. Two of them are sons of Sante Donadel, assistant coach, former first-grade coach and a former player for over 50 years. The Donadels moved to Griffith in 1970; Sante’s father played for Yoogali, and made life-long friends at the club, and his uncle was coach of Griffith United when they did the double in ’71.
“We’re still learning, as players, coaches and our committee, how to deal with that level of football, the NPL,” Donadel says. “It’s by far the best comp we’ve played in. But it’s been good. We’re one of the only [regional] clubs to have ever done something like this.”
Things have been tracking well on the field. They recently smashed last season’s premiers, Gungahlin United, 5-1.
But then, without warning, Capital Football (CF) announced last month that the 2025 season would be Yoogali’s last, having conducted a review which recommended the removal of teams from the Riverina - including the Wagga City Wanderers, who play in Canberra’s second tier - from their competitions, again citing administrative reasons.
History is repeating.
“Unfortunately, we can’t control where we’re located. For some reason, our grandparents chose Griffith because of the soil,” Santolin says.
“When it comes to football, yeah, it’s always been a hurdle. But it’s never dulled our spirit. If anything, as a club, we’ve embraced it. It’s a feather in our cap, in the sense that we go there, and we go toe-to-toe with these teams from the bigger cities, and in many cases, come out on top. We use it to galvanise us. And that’s why we’ve got such a big club spirit, that we’re just not willing to surrender.
“But it just gets to a point ... it’s our 71st year in existence. When do we get to breathe easier? It feels like we’re always looking over our shoulder. As soon as you start doing well or getting too comfortable in a competition, the rug gets pulled from under you.”
Yoogali SC celebrates their 2023 championship in the Capital Premier League, which secured promotion to the NPL.CREDIT: ANDREW MCLEAN
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