Have you ever wondered how much both past and present time has gone into keeping the clubs games played records up to date?
In the early 1980’s, Life Member Brendan Sheehan took it upon himself to set up a players game register of the current players. Working on the basis of fixtured games a year (less 2 for injury or unavailability) + finals, he created a card for each player (no bigger than a playing card size) and calculated a rough estimate to that date. Every year he would record each player’s games based on team sheets, and periodically, list it in the Club’s newsletters which were printed and distributed (as per 1986 images).
When the women reformed in 1994 (after folding for 8 years), there were no cards with women’s records in existance until Julie Stephens (women’s director) contacted the Victorian Women’s Hockey Association to request copies of the VWHA team sheets so that she could determine who had played for Footscray in past years. From this an invitation to all past players to a ‘Chicken and Champagne Breakfast’ was held in an endeavour to field a team. Second to that the team sheets were used to start tallying up past games for women who had played with Footscray. These statistics were added to Brendan Sheehan’s card collection.
Roll on to the electronic era in the early 2000’s, when Nicole Virtuoso (then general secretary) prepared the first spreadsheet. Games were initially recorded from Brendan’s cards and then updated after being manually tallied up from each team’s teambook sheets, with assistance from Sian Owen, Darryl Jahnke and Mark White. Each year’s spreadsheet was vetted by Brendan before being distributed and published. This continued until 2010, when HV introduced its electronic game and player recording system ‘Sporting Pulse’.
Sue Milford took over the task in 2018 of keeping the spreadsheets up to date for our current and recent past members. Sue and her husband Peter worked together to build a new spreadsheet where each year’s data would be added as new columns with the games downloaded from HV (winter season only). This system continues today, ensuring every game is added to the right person and that all new members are added.
Sue has to ensure that they;
Don’t add a new player, where a slight variation of their name or incorrect birthdate entry, change of surname, or space or apostrophe in the wrong place.
allocate games correctly when we have duplicate names (different birthdays)
note the first year of playing juniors/womens/mens/masters
don’t lose any games along the way.
For those who love stats, the master tally sheet is currently 117 columns by approx. 2500 rows (players), adding 7000-8000 games and about 50 -100 new players per year. This year over 200,000 games have been recorded!
Towards the end of the home /away season, preparation of the data can take 1-2 days. This data can be used for predicting the number of milestones for the current and upcoming year. At the end of each season, a final download is processed and games tally is published (another half – 1 day).
Games are recorded as soon as someone of any age pulls on a Footscray shirt and competes in a HV organised winter competition.
Brendan’s effort is establishing a recording system (his own) to recognise the valued contribution of every player to take the field in a Footscray shirt, is much appreciated by our own, and envied by opposition clubs. Brendan believed that not everyone would get to win a Best and Fairest or play in the top squad, but all players deserved to be recognised for their appearances in the Red, White and Blue. The celebrations around milestone games has become a wonderful club event!
We thank Nicole for continuing the legacy into the digital age and we gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Sue and Peter Milford for their current work in maintaining the records of over 2400 members!
Current games record holders (at the end of 2023, * – still playing in that category)
Juniors – Hayley McAlinden (244)
Womens – Julie Anne Sheehan (509*)
Mens – Alby Speed (766)
Masters Women – Joanne Torr (224*)
Masters Men – Clive Quick (388*)
Overall Club games Men – Neil Coster (1109*)
Overall Club games Women – Nicole Virtuoso (652*)
We look forward to celebrating Gary Marshall’s 900th club game in the coming weeks.
