By Molly Magennis
With the footy season fast approaching, the Altona Vikings senior men’s team is gearing up for what they hope will be an uninterrupted 2022 season.
The team competes in division one of the WRFL and has returned to training early in preparation for the season.
Unfortunately, like many sporting clubs, COVID has heavily impacted the teams start to year, affecting the motivation levels of some players, coach Corey McCall said.
“The old COVID situation [is] wreaking havoc across the board, I’d say it’s happening to a lot of clubs,” he said.
“We’ve got players that are seven day close contacts with family or wives and girlfriends and then we’ve got guys that have actually ended up catching COVID.
“We’re just trying to be very resilient when it comes to training. You know, it has affected some of our players in terms of motivation and playing going forward.”
Despite this, McCall said the coaching group remains positive.
“[We’re] very compassionate towards the guys and want them to get healthy so that they can get back out there and train and get amongst their mates.”
The Vikings have been lucky enough to secure a handful of new signings for 2022, including former Richmond and North Melbourne player Conor Menadue.
“He’s an Altona junior, so it’s great for local footy to have players that are junior football players at your football club, come back and play senior football.,” McCall said.
Elliot Cavallaro, a former Altona player who left to play country football in Shepparton has also made a return to the Vikings.
“He’s coming back to play football with us this season, which is awesome. Once again Altona and the club culture, you notice a lot of guys try to take their wares somewhere else and end up coming back which is really good for us,” McCall said.
“But essentially we want to grow a lot of our list from our juniors as well.”
Before the 2021 season was interrupted due to COVID, Altona was sitting on top of the ladder, with 10 wins and two losses.
McCall said he would like to replicate the same direction the team was heading in last year.
“We were in a really good spot,” he said. “Unfortunately, every pre-season that we’ve done throughout COVID has been a different type of pre-season due to players’ mental health and challenges that they’ve got with work and COVID etcetera, so we haven’t put any expectations on or anything like that.
“It’s more that we just want to get everyone back together rather than have some players here, some players there.”
The Vikings will begin playing practice games in March as they lead up to their round one match against St. Albans on April 2.
Molly Magennis
