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Auskick nurtures leaders
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Auskick nurtures leaders, both big and little
By Matthew Slater, REMONDIS Australia // 5 September 2025
Senior Project Manager Matt Slater has applied his considerable project managment skills to a new field of play: Auskick
Matt volunteered to be President of his local junior footy club in September 2023 – bringing both professional expertise and passion for the game to the clubroom (while continuing to coach the Year 3 boys' team)
The once-struggling footy club is now thriving, with new players, keen sponsors and a newly launched girls’ team. And it’s just been named Sports Club of the Year for the City of Cockburn, among a swag of awards
PERSPECTIVE
In case you don’t know, Auskick is the prelude to Junior footy. And that’s Aussie Rules footy, not soccer. Boys and girls do Auskick from Prep to Year 2 – roughly aged 4 to 7, so they’re real littlies – and then they move on to Juniors from Year 3.
Matt Slater is a Senior Project Manager with REMONDIS’s Integrated and Managed Services team. Based in Perth, his day job is all about managing the delivery of waste and recycling services for big customers with complex needs, including Woolworths. It’s a fast-paced job, with lots of problem-solving and a constant drive to anticipate future needs and find new ways to increase diversion of waste from landfill.
Matt’s also an alumni of REMONDIS Australia’s 2024 Emerging Leaders Program, which nurtures high-performing staff with professional development and executive education and mentorship. He’s a man with professional expertise plus – as his kids, family and friends know well – a passion for community and the energy to make things happen.
How did Matt turn a struggling local footy club into one of the sport’s great success stories? Let’s hear directly from Matt.
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It all started four years ago, on the eve of my five-year-old son’s first Auskick season.
I got a call from the club I had registered him with, saying they didn’t have a coach. So, I said I would do it. With no experience at all! And the next day, I had 20 five-year-olds all excited for their first day of footy, and we just went from there.
A few years later at the AGM, the Club’s President was stepping down and asked for a volunteer to step up, and there was just silence. Complete silence. So, I put my hand up. No experience on Committees or Boards, and suddenly I’m President of a football club.
But it turns out our club was in a lot of trouble. We live in a tiny suburb, with a small feeder school. We only had one sponsor and made limited use of grants. Enrolments were declining year-on-year, and we lost two teams due to lack of numbers in my first few months.
By coincidence, I was selected for REMONDIS’s Emerging Leaders Program around this time. It was perfect. I actually had my own little business to play with, in a real-life situation, applying concepts I was learning in the program.
In the Emerging Leaders Program we were working on strategy, and I applied this to the football club, asking myself, “what do we do well, and where do we want to play, and what opportunities are there to grow?”
I landed on Auskick. We needed a very strong Auskick program to then feed the Junior teams.
So we went hard on marketing Auskick. I took over as Auskick Coordinator and created a template for how each coach should run their group. We really focused on our brand – including putting all our coaches in uniforms – and built a very strong social media. I spent annual leave days in primary schools running footy clinics. We were in the community a lot at markets, and selling snags at Bunnings, handing out flyers and stickers.
And Auskick registrations almost doubled! We won an award from Western Australian Football Commission for an outstanding increase in enrolments at the start of the 2024 Season, just 6 months into my Presidency and at the end of the year we won the Auskick Centre of the Year award for our district.
What about the girls?
At the same time, I was noticing that girls would enrol aged 5 and show up all enthusiastic, then three or four weeks in, they were gone. I realised the program unconsciously catered for boys, who often grew up kicking a footy. The girls liked footy but hadn’t really played. Essentially, we were missing an opportunity to attract 50% of kids to the club.
So I launched All Girls Auskick. We started with five girls in total and two of those were sisters! Everyone told me it wouldn’t work, but I pushed forward and five became 17 and kept on growing, and now a quarter of all our Auskick players are girls and – best of all – we also have a thriving Year 3 girls Junior football team.
That Junior girls team took some creative thinking. With only three girls signed up I went and got a grant from Telstra for $2000 and we offered 100% free girls footy. All rego fees paid, uniforms… all free. We pushed hard and the team has just grown from strength to strength. We are also now one of the only clubs in WA to be a signatory of the AFLs Woman in Football Charter, committing to making our club welcoming, safe and inclusive for all.
I started out also coaching that Junior girls’ team on a Sunday and I don’t even have a daughter! Part way through the season, we had another Dad step up and take the reins, so now we have a sustainable girls team.
And what about the money?
So we had great growth in registrations, but the club was still going broke.
Handily, I was learning about balance sheets and P&L reporting in the Emerging Leaders Program. I got hands-on supporting our new Treasurer, purchased Xero – thanks to more grant funding – and transferred our books over from Excel. With our books in order, it was obvious we had less money in the bank than it takes to run a footy club for a year.
But we now had a product that was marketable and easy to sell, so we went on a sponsorship drive, adding six more sponsors for a total contribution of over $10,000 a year. We also applied for several grants which bought in another $6,000. At the same time my wife and a friend took over the canteen, taking it from breaking even to making a $10,000 profit in a year.
The club is now making enough money to grow, and to provide our players with anything we need. These days we put on large community events with bouncy castles, animal farms and live music and invite the whole suburb.
And the thing is, we keep winning awards! We were named 2024 Metro South Auskick Centre of the Year. One of our coaches won 2024 Junior Coach of the Year, and we received 2024 Sports Club of the Year from the City of Cockburn. I also received a Volunteer of the Year award from Bibra Lake Residents Association.
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So, in short, in one year we took a team that was actually on the edge of going broke and turned it into a thriving business and club. Our club’s culture has changed too. Our committee has doubled in size and we’ve gone from very few parents helping, to people asking to help.
The biggest thing I get out of it is the satisfaction of seeing an oval full of kids and their parents enjoying footy and knowing that I played a huge part in that. And watching a girls’ team thrive when every person told me it would fail – that’s a game-winning goal, for sure.
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