The Kerang Rotary Club Footy Trip Story

Warrnambool & Kerang Rotary Clubs and Toyota AFL School Football Trip
"Lets Have A Fun Day Out At The Football"

Several months ago, it was actually in the later part of 2007 the Kerang Rotary Club had a visit from the Warrnambool Rotary Club and turned up at one of our weekly dinner meetings. They wanted to come  to discuss a joint proposal in regards to offering their services to try and help children, and their family's in the "Drought" affected local area of Kerang. It was quite an eventful meeting with a lot of idea's tossed around, but nothing concrete was decided at that point in time.
 
It was a short time later that Warrnambool Rotary Club contacted our then President Bruce Carey and said, "Look we have an idea!"   Warrnambool Rotary Club just decided to get 100 football tickets to a Melb v Nth Melb AFL Football match. They then approached Toyota Australia through one of their members who is the Toyota Dealer at Warrnambool, which they received 100 tickets and asked that the tickets come through Kerang Toyota the Principle Dealer John Bradbury.  Warrnambool Central Rotary Club  and the Group 5 Rotary Clubs rallied together and have paid for Millars Bus Lines to take everyone to the games as well.

The first of the 2 games is the 27th July Melbourne v Nth Melbourne at the MCG, the second match is on the 3rd August St Kilda v Port Adelaide at the Telstra Dome.

It was around this time that Kerang Rotarian Phil Price who had been handling a lot of the first talks with Warrnambool Rotary approached Rotarian Chris Ellis to take the job over, as Phil already had a lot on his plate.

Chris Ellis put together a letter and application form which where sent out to all the local Primary Schools, these included, Quambatook Primary School, Lalbert Primary, Murrabit Primary, Lake Charm Primary, Koondrook Primary, Kerang Christian School, St Joseph's Primary, Kerang Primary, and Kerang South Primary. Chris worked out an allocated formula for each school based on the amount of children between grade 3 – Grade 6 in each school, from there names where put into a hat(to make the selection process fair), and drawn from there. From that point we had a fair proportion of firm allocations, allowing a second draw to take place in some of those schools that had students miss out.

Chris then asked Rotarian Tim Collins to help put together a list of names and numbers from each school so that this would then help with the setting up of the Itinerary and help schools with allocations. Along with that Tim set up an Itinerary for both games, with approx times.

As at the 17th July we are fully booked, which has been a fantastic outcome. Families and Schools have been very excited and enthusiastic about the whole project.

Chris & I have both talked about what a wonderful event its going to be, and we really can't thank enough the generosity of the Warrnambool Rotary Club, and to the other Rotary Clubs that have already been mentioned at the top of this story that have put money into this project.

Our Rotary President for this year Jenny Kelly has seen it as a great way of bring Clubs together, and is very keen to have reports on the final outcome.