Sport
Shepparton United Football Netball Club promotes road safety after powerful wellbeing session
The importance of safety on our roads is an observation all drivers should observe — but sometimes, sports clubs find themselves in the eye of the storm.
Losing a young person on the roads — a demographic particularly susceptible, as Victorian statistics regularly show — is harrowing for all involved, from family to friends, classmates and co-workers.
For Sharon O’Dwyer, who lost her son Mathew to an accident three years ago, it couldn’t possibly hit any closer to home.
Mathew was involved with Shepparton United, Nathalia and Waaia football netball clubs in differing capacities, carrying aspirations of senior premierships along the way as he balanced playing and coaching duties.
His death in 2021, following a single-vehicle impact just off a rural road near his home at age 26, was the 28th Victorian road death that year, and mirrors that of too many others in regional areas.
In the 2023 calendar year, 173 lives were lost on rural Victorian roads, while 79 fatalities were aged between 18 and 29 — both sizeable increases on the year prior.
It’s a message that Matt’s former club Shepparton United takes seriously and it brought Sharon to a training session on Thursday last week for a wellbeing session involving all of its playing rosters.
Carrying her late son’s boots into Deakin Reserve and adorned in a Demons scarf, O’Dwyer’s appearance underscored the grief and impact that extends to local sporting organisations who lose one of their own prematurely.
O’Dwyer herself sums up what she hopes to achieve by holding these talks.
“It’s super important to me,” O’Dwyer said.
“I want to have an impact on the players and help them understand not only what certain decisions do to themselves, but what it does to the community and especially family.
“The lesson is you don’t need to rush around to get anywhere, or to get to training. If you’re going to be late, call someone.
“It’s better that way than for a parent or the police to turn up and deal with a crash.
“Matt won’t get to win that senior premiership that he was aiming for and he won’t get to purchase that block of land and build the home he wanted.”
The important conversation came as part of the TAC’s Band Together Initiative, aiming to strengthen its connection with clubs statewide by engineering a themed round around driver awareness.
The weekend of Friday, July 19 to Sunday, July 21 — where Shepparton United meets Benalla at Deakin Reserve — will mark Road Safety Round, where all AFL Victoria-affiliated clubs will wear special blue armbands with QR codes printed on to access further resources.
Shepparton United football operations manager Jason Kelly, himself formerly of the police force, understands the issue well on both fronts.
“From a club point of view, it’s extremely important that young people know the dangers on our roads,” Kelly said.
“The amount of young people who lose their lives, particularly on country roads, is too high.
“We like to educate our young people as a club and we want to have an impact on the general community as well.
“I was in the police job for 26 years and I went to too many fatal accidents; one of our young blokes was first on the scene of a fatal a few weeks ago and we wrapped our arms around him as a club.
“The onus is on us to teach our young people as best we can; with Sharon’s story, it goes to show that unfortunately, fatalities on our roads touch every family, including ours.”
Senior Constable Leigh Johnson, who also sports the title of Multicultural Liaison Officer, was on hand at Deakin Reserve to fully endorse the message and reinforce its importance to United’s demographic.
“I certainly applaud Shepparton United for their initiative,” Johnson said.
“What I want to stress is that these amounts of fatalities aren’t just a number — it’s families and communities everywhere that are affected by them.
“It’s also about not only the legal, but the personal, social and financial ramifications of perhaps a poor decision on the road.
“My role is to do a lot of education programs, whether at schools or through the L2P program, and just get the message through to young people.
“There’s no doubt 18 to 25-year-olds are over-represented in our statistics; if we can make a difference with one person in the way they think, then we’ve achieved what we need to, but we hope to influence many.”