Buried in the depths of the vast chasm of content on social media is a humble line in the bio of a regional sporting minnow.
‘Smallest town in the state with a rugby league team!’
This claim belongs to the Rankins Springs Dragons, a club from a dusty little town, population 208, a figure you’d swear has been inflated by a simple drive through the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town.
Sure, Dungowan in Group 4 has fewer people, but it is a locality with no defined residential area, and the vast majority of its players hail from Tamworth, just 25 minutes north.
Rankins Springs, on the other hand, is a functioning, bustling hub of a petrol station, a pub, a school and…not much else.
Rugby league is the lifeblood of the town, and the President of the Rankins Springs club, Brent Parsons, said that the inauguration of the new competition transformed life in the local community.
“It’s gone from having two people in the pub on a Thursday night to having 20 blokes, 10 girls from footy, and 20 people from outside of footy to come in and have a beer, because that’s when the pub is half packed so they come in because they have people to talk to,” he said.
“It just brings back the sense of community and the sense of pride in having a football side again, and everyone talks [about] ‘how’d the Dragons go’, ‘what are the Dragons doing’, and ‘are you gonna win this week’.
“Obviously, when we didn’t have footy, we didn’t have that talk going on, [and] it just [creates] a big sense of community, because like I said before, without football, rugby league, you don’t have much of a community.”
From 2006, when the Millennial drought was at its peak, until 2018, there was no club in Rankins Springs, and no football competition in the region.
Fields lay empty and the weekly pilgrimage to local ovals across the region became a thing of the past.
So what was the catalyst for the sudden change in the town’s footballing fortunes?
The formation of a new competition, with six games over seven weekends, six clubs in total, and six matches in total across men’s and women’s divisions each weekend, all at the same venue, much like the NRL’s ‘Magic Round’.
Over a beer at a local pub in 2017, this new footballing format, known as the ‘community cup’, was born, and the benefits of the game returning to the region can be seen across all towns involved in the league, with the effect of having something to do in town stretching far beyond the confines of the sidelines at the local sports ground.
After initially travelling into Griffith to play in the neighbouring Group 20 competition during the Dragons’ 12 year recess, Parsons said that after turning 18, the lack of a local side in Rankins Springs and the multiple hour-long trips to training twice a week saw him give the game away and spend his weekends away from the region altogether.
“I know from my own point of view, from when I was 19 to 27, I never had local footy to play, so I just didn’t play footy,” he said.
“Every weekend we’d get in the car and go to Wagga [Wagga] for the weekend, we didn’t spend it in our community, not because there was nothing to do, [but] just because there [were] more young people in Wagga.
“So having footy back, everyone looks forward to Saturday when the football is on, [and] it brings [together] everyone on the farms who come and have a beer and watch footy.”
According to the club President, the town’s love of the Dragons goes beyond the sporting side of things, with the footy being a community event.
“You don’t have to be a rugby league tragic to like footy, you’ve just got to like your community.”
“We thought it was gone for good, gone forever, but once you have it back it’s pretty special, you don’t want to lose a simple game like rugby league again.”
Surely, you’d think, the Dragons are the only team in the league with such a small population, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Local arch-rivals Goolgowi field a team from a population of 416, Ivanhoe from just 281, and former two-time Clayton Cup winners (making them the best team in the state) Barellan, draw from a pool of 459.
Hillston, a powerhouse of the competition in the 1980s, has a population of over 1,500, Narrandera is home to 3,900 people, and Deniliquin, which is set to re-enter its rugby league team for the first time in 48 years next season, has 6,000-odd residents.
Hillston Bluebirds President Ben Pittman said that getting involved in footy was key to getting to know people and immersing himself in the local community out on the banks of the Lachlan River after he moved to the region six years ago.
“Myself, I’m not a Hillston local, I came to Hillston in 2018, but I got pretty well involved with the footy club, because I thought this is great, there’s rugby here, something to do,” he said.
“Even though it wasn’t too far from my hometown, Hay, the best way to get in there and know people is to play sport.”
“Experiencing the Proten [Community Cup] competition for what it is, the social side of it, where everyone plays on the same day and everyone goes to the pub after playing a game of footy was honestly something unheard of from my previous days in Group 20 [with the Hay Magpies], when you only [play] that one individual side in all their grades, but you’re sort of enemies.”
Although hailing from a slightly larger town, the Bluebirds have a different set of challenges that they share with fellow clubs Barellan and Narrandera, in that these towns also field an Australian rules football side.
Rather than seeing the ‘Swannies’ as a rival, however, Pittman sees having two different football codes in town as a positive.
“It’s good to see that the oval is getting used, hopefully the more it gets used the council might decide to fix it one day,” he said with a chuckle.
“It does liven [the town] up, with the field being used nearly five days a week for Swans training [on] Tuesdays and Thursdays and [Bluebirds] training Wednesdays and Fridays.
“I think it’s great, but obviously I will admit that because the Bluebirds folded, obviously that means the only option here was for people to go to AFL, so now you’ve got all the younger generation who are all in their twenties who never had the opportunity to play rugby league [because] growing up in Hillston their only sporting option was AFL.
“It’s great to have both sports, but rugby league is a bit slept on here I think, there’s still a crowd of NRL lovers, but it’s pretty minimal compared to the Swannies.”
The concept of ‘community cup’ football, which spawned in these small towns on the dry plains of the Western Riverina, seemed tailor-made for the unique challenges of these small farming communities, built perfectly for the three-month gap between sowing season and harvest.
However, the idea of a shorter, more community-focused competition has begun to spread far and wide across the state, with a similarly modelled league taking off in the foothills of the Blue Mountains and across the eastern part of the Central West.
After the three remaining clubs in the Mid West Cup were merged into the neighbouring second-tier competition, the Woodbridge Cup, in 2022, many of the smaller teams who were unable to make the jump were left without a competition.
They were not about to die wondering though, and after looking at the Western Riverina competition in consultation with the NSWRL, the Mid West Community Cup was born.
The competition model was almost identical to their Western Riverina counterparts, with a single round-robin followed by finals, but with one major twist – the competition was set to run in spring, so as not to clash with the other region’s two major leagues, which ran in the traditional winter months, and to allow players to play in both competitions.
The resulting competition was a raging success, and within the space of three seasons, the competition grew from four sides to seven this year.
Blackheath Blackcats Captain-Coach Ryan Evans said that the concept’s success has been replicated in the Mid West, and has ensured the town can field a football side once again.
“It’s done quite a lot [for the town], because Blackheath didn’t have a team for about the three or four years after the Mid West Cup actually shut down,” he said.
“It brought a lot of older players who weren’t playing or who were playing in different competitions back together to play for their hometown, because they were travelling for football out of town.”
A key feature of the competition’s renaissance has been increased community involvement, something that has contributed to the Blackcats’ recent success, with the club claiming back-to-back premierships over the past two seasons.
“The community get behind it, [and] the concept of the one home game, where every team comes to that home game, has worked really well because it makes it a really good day of football.
“We [had] the Grand Final at Blackheath [last] weekend, and there [were] six games of footy over the day, so it really makes it a big day for the town and everyone really gets behind it and tries to get back into the country footy which is really good.”
The biggest test for the community cup concept may lay ahead however, and in yet another totally different area of the state, with plans to resurrect teams ranging from 30 to 50 years in recess being discussed in the Southern and Eastern Riverina, a place where rugby league has fallen away in recent years and Australian rules has taken a firm grip.
However, the region’s rugby league enthusiasts haven’t given up on the hope of clubs such as the Coolamon Raiders, Holbrook Warriors, and the famous 1969 Clayton Cup winners, the Tarcutta Maroons, returning to the paddock one day soon.
One of those passionate country volunteers, Tom Besgrove, formed the first ever junior rugby league club in Coolamon at the start of this year, and based upon the support his club received, he believes that there is certainly scope to bring back the senior team, who last took to the field way back in 1994, with a springtime community cup format being the obvious choice.
“A community cup style competition would suit the situation and would be a bit more of a seamless transition, particularly as it [a senior club] would be starting completely from scratch,” he said.
“I think it’s likely to engage the people in town who are rugby league fans anyway, but even those that play AFL who are also rugby league fans and would like to play, it still entices that type of character I think.
“At this point in time and for quite some time, it would just not be sustainable for a senior club like Coolamon Raiders to go into Group 9, or even Group 20 for that matter.”
Besgrove provided another example of a successful small-town footballing operation in the form of the Castlereagh League’s Reserve Grade competition, which is now run under a shorter, community-cup style format over the final few weekends of the First Grade season’s traditional 14-week campaign, and according to the former Group 9 star, if it weren’t for competitions such as these, he believes many of the players competing in them would simply be lost to the game.
“I’m pretty bullish about how good they are, and being someone who is from an incredibly small town in the Western region called Dunedoo, I have seen first hand how it has kept people and communities in the game, and it has also kept them social and physically active for a longer period of time as a result,” he said.
“I know that there are players that are playing in Proten that would have been totally lost to the game, and by lost to the game, I’m talking certainly not playing, not helping in any administrative fashion, and if their kids aren’t playing, potentially not involved even in junior league.
“Those types of characters who love the game have now got an opportunity to come back and play, and probably more importantly socialise and be physically active.”
With the benefits stretching from improved mental and physical health to community engagement and the economic benefits for local pubs and clubs, the community cup format has proven itself as the best solution to arresting the decline of rugby league in small rural and regional communities.
With the short, sharp format and single match day involving all clubs at the one ground gaining popularity rapidly in smaller competitions without multiple grades and juniors to fill the program, the possibilities are endless for the community cup, where every round truly is ‘Magic Round’.