Goulburn Valley Hockey Association is not prepared to put its season to bed.
Yet.
Despite a void of clarity shrouding community sport’s state of play, the association is holding off until the last minute before calling an end to the 2021 campaign.
President Cameron Druitt is — lockdown permitting — grasping on to hope the weekend of September 18-19 can be used to host a finals wrap up for the competition.
“We’d like to make use of that weekend until we definitively know we can’t, but we’re going to have to make that decision this week sometime,” Druitt said.
“We want to give teams time next week to train prior to the finals.
“Until that gets ruled out, we’re holding out for a little bit longer.”
Druitt has been buoyed by rumours regional Victoria will be pulled out of lockdown soon, but indicated the finals template would be dictated by whether or not Shepparton is included in the easing of restrictions.
He also said the structure would have the top two teams out of each competition play each other in a one-off grand final.
“We have all agreed we can wrap our seasons up given a one week opportunity with first versus second grand final; we’ve discussed it and people see that as a fair and reasonable conclusion to competitions,” he said.
“Also on offer will be opportunities for teams to play consolation finals; third versus fourth et cetera — that will be via agreement between clubs.
“But in terms of time, it’s either then (September 18-19) or not at all. Going in later, we’re a week into school holidays and from experience doing that last year, that was really pushing it.”
With the association's pool holding fewer club numbers compared to other district leagues, Druitt saw the opportunity to tie off the season in a single weekend as a positive.
“We’ve probably got advantages over other sports where we do have small sized competitions,” he said.
“In most cases, teams have played each other twice already and we also have the luxury of our own facility which we can fire up at any point with little preparations to occur.”
If restrictions are not lifted, Druitt mapped out how the association would honour the current standings of each division.
“We’d be going down the path of looking at awarding minor premierships which haven’t really been officially acknowledged in the GVHA in the past,” he said.
“A significant amount of the season was played, so we can’t just leave it with no real result.
“We’ll still proceed with awarding best-and-fairest and top goal-scoring trophies, all that can still go ahead.”
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