Sport as community infrastructure

It is easy to cover sport as a series of results. The deeper story sits in the clubs themselves: the people who line the fields, run the canteen, drive the vans, coach the juniors and keep the lights on when nobody is watching.

Local clubs are some of the most reliable community infrastructure in the country. They give young people somewhere to go, older people somewhere to belong, and newcomers a way into a town. When a club closes, something more than a fixture list disappears.

Funding pressures, volunteer fatigue, facility upkeep and the slow drift of codes in and out of fashion are all live issues at the grassroots. They rarely make the back page, but they decide what sport looks like a decade from now.

Our sport coverage will keep one eye on the elite game and another on the clubrooms.