Doreen Leary

Ulverstone Football Club Volunteer

There are plenty of other great volunteers, and I couldn’t do it without them.

Anyone involved with a sports club understands that volunteers are its lifeblood.

Passionate, tireless supporters who keep everything going behind the scenes, often without the glory of a goal, the spotlight of a big play, or a headline in the local paper.

When it comes to commitment, few can compete with Doreen Leary. As licensee of Ulverstone Football Club, Doreen holds an official role that comes with countless responsibilities: stocking the bar and the canteen, managing bar staff, handling finances and paperwork, and processing clothing orders for players.

But Doreen’s dedication to the club stretches far beyond her formal duties.

“I’m down here a lot,” she says. “Monday to Friday when the juniors are training, I’m here every day. Then on weekend gamedays, I’m first to arrive and last to leave. There’s a lot of gameday admin – making sure the changerooms are clean and tidy, prepping the equipment, sorting team sheets and getting the paperwork ready for match managers, counting the gate money throughout the day, and then entering all the scores into PlayHQ for people to check on the results.”

Doreen is enormously proud of the strong community spirit at Ulverstone. On gamedays, the club has around 50 volunteers who show up to help out, and for Junior games there is a gate roster and a canteen roster, both of which rely heavily on the parents in each age group to come and work a shift.

Even with this fantastic assistance, Doreen’s decade-long involvement with the club brings a level of insight and a depth of knowledge that’s hard to match.

“We’ve got a great junior co-ordinator who is here all day for gamedays, and I’m just in the background helping him out,” she explains. “You have to make sure the canteen is stocked, clear the gate through the day, check there are paper towels in the toilets – all that kind of thing.”

“There are plenty of other great volunteers, and I couldn’t do it without them, but I guess I’ve been here long enough to know the small things that need to be done that other people might overlook. I like to lock up at the end of the day and make sure everyone gets home safely. I even take the recycling bins out every week.”

Doreen has played a number of sports in her time, including volleyball, basketball, and netball. She insists that she wasn’t a particularly skilled player, but says that the strong sense of camaraderie and connection she built through those teams is what initially prompted her to start volunteering with Ulverstone Football Club in 2013. Now, twelve years on, she describes the club as her second home.

The football club is a community of its own. It’s like a family really. I’m just one of many volunteers that keep the club running.

“When I first joined, I took on the role of secretary,” says Doreen. “That had been a paid role in the past, but I did it as a volunteer. My husband Terry also stepped in to manage the bar – another role that had previously been paid, but he took it on voluntarily.”

Doreen and Terry’s son Andrew, who is a trained accountant, joined the club as treasurer and got the books in order. “He’d played for the club from his teenage years and done a bit of a coaching,” Doreen explains. “But really, it’s not until you start doing volunteer work that you really understand how much needs to be done behind the scenes.”

Andrew has since stepped back from the bookkeeping role, which has now been outsourced to professionals due to the increased workload. Terry still helps out, handling maintenance and repair issues at the clubhouse whenever he can.

The example set by Doreen and her family has clearly created a ripple effect across the club, inspiring players, families, and service organisations like the Lions Club and Rotary to lend a hand and keep things running smoothly. Doreen is especially pleased to see players stepping up to help when the club hosts Players’ Teas throughout the season.

“The teas are a nice way of getting everyone together in a casual environment,” she says. “After the reserves and seniors train on a Thursday evening, they come into the club rooms and we have a nice warm fire going, a home-cooked meal, and then some of them will play a game of 8-ball. It’s a very family-friendly atmosphere and we usually do about 60 meals. That’s all done by volunteers in the kitchen, and it’s lovely when you see a couple of players going in there to help with the washing up and wipe down afterwards. They don’t just rock up for the meal and then leave again – they really care about the club and the volunteers.”

For Doreen, who is now retired from full-time employment, the rewards of her volunteer role are numerous: meeting new people, watching the progress of Junior players as they grow up and move through the age groups, and strengthening her connections with the Ulverstone community.

Although the club is considering redistributing some responsibilities among the board to ease some of Doreen’s workload, she has no plans to step back from her role in the foreseeable future. The personal satisfaction and sense of camaraderie she finds at the club are simply irreplaceable.

“If any of the kids pass me on the street, they’ll always say ‘Hello, Doreen!’ and it gives me such satisfaction to realise they know me for what I do. The football club is a community of its own. It’s like a family really. I’m just one of many volunteers that keep the club running. I couldn’t do what I do without the help of a lot of other people around the club, so I’m very grateful.”