Adrian Hickey has been the Dubbo Demons first grade coach for the past two years and, in his second grand final with the club, recently took home the silverware in recording a 15.12. 102 to 6.9. 45 victory over reigning champs, Bathurst Bushrangers.

This win was the ultimate accolade for Adrian, who has been playing Australian Rules his entire life.

“I played for Berrigan in my juniors, then I played senior football for Tocumwal, and then near Shepparton for Congupna for a couple of years,” Adrian said.

“Then I moved up to Bathurst – I actually played for the Bathurst Bushrangers, for about six or seven years so this is my fourth year playing for Dubbo.

“We’ve got real depth, we’ve really been trying to first build the culture, have people enjoy themselves, but make it really serious and drive a standard so people can see that we’re going to get some results,” he added.

Hickey said the Demons has regular players travelling from as far afield as Warren, Wellington, Mendooran, Coonamble and Mudgee, many of whom grew up down south and are now working on farms or at mines in the region.

“They’ve come back year after year because I feel like we’ve given them a good environment, and that’s building into the team we’ve got now.

“We’ve just been building and it’s been snowballing – at some training sessions a few years ago, we might have got five or six blokes on a Thursday night, now we can have 50 or 60 here, which is really good.”

He was glad to see the good turn-up of locals who’ve had no previous exposure to the AFL brand coming along on the Saturday afternoon grand final to support the local team

“The atmosphere is what it’s all about, getting people to come here would mean a lot to the club, particularly with our first grand final in, I think, 19 years being held in Dubbo. It’s a big deal. The women’s team has been very successful for quite a few years now, and it’s really good that the men’s teams are now becoming quite strong.”

One local drumming-up a crowd is Tom Skinner, who doubles as reserve grade captain and Auskick Coordinator.

From one of Dubbo’s best-known cricketing families, Tom had never watched a game of AFL until a couple of mates from his cricket club talked him into having a crack about 13 years ago.

“They said ‘come and have a run, you’re a big bloke, you’ll enjoy it’, so I came along, had a kick and fell in love with the game,” he said.

“Now I’m trying to grow the game, obviously coordinating Auskick, I’ve got my four kids playing and I suppose I’m at the back end of my career, that’s why I’m in reserve grade.

“I’m really excited for this.”

Tom said his baptism of fire was anything but gentle, and a bit of a shock as he’d grown-up in a city where League and Union fans look on AFL as aerial ping pong.

“I watched the game on the Friday night before I played on the Saturday and my mates said, ‘You’re a big fella, go in the ruck, just jump and try and hit the ball forward’,” he said.

“I got kneed in the guts by the other bloke, I didn’t realise you could lift your knee, I folded over and I was like jeez, this is a lot rougher than I thought it would be.”

“We’ve had a heap of league players come along and have a season with us, there have been different league players through the years who have all come and had a kick and actually got a shock at how physical it is.

“It’d be awesome to fill South Dubbo Oval, just for the club and for everyone who’s put in the work over the years to build the club up. When I first started playing, all of our reserve grade would double up and play two games because we were light on numbers, and it’s so good to see the club in the position where we’ve got a full reserve squad and a first-grade squad, and the ladies have been doing so well.

It’s growing the club and it’d be awesome to have everyone in Dubbo come and support us.” The success story for the Demons in recent years has been the womens’ team, winning a string of flags and fronted up again this year for a grand final rematch against old foes Bathurst Bushrangers, which they ultimately lost.

Kirsten Coady captained the girls and lined up on the wing or in the half-forward line and is a relatively recent convert to the game after growing up playing many different sports as a Dubbo local.

“I played soccer a lot as a kid, I did a lot of judo and gymnastics and volleyball as well and I thought footy might be a good sport and when I found out there was a women’s team in Dubbo, I joined immediately,” she said.

“I was very old when I joined, but better late than never, right, it’s so much fun, it’s the best fitness, best gameplay, just a free-flowing sport that really suits the way that I play.”

Above and beyond the game itself and recent success on the field, Kirsten said the Demons’ culture is the club’s greatest attribute.

“We’ve worked a lot on that over the last few years, and a lot of people will come and train with us and the first thing they notice is how the women and the men integrate their training, because it’s not very common,” she said.

“For a lot of clubs, their men’s teams and women’s teams are very separate, but our men’s team have really got around us for the last few years, they can see that it’s really bringing our skill level up to train with them, and our girls love it too because it makes us fast and it makes us better decision-makers. We’ve got to be tough to compete with the boys.

“I think it’s a really good sign that the club culture has nice integration across the squads.”

Being captain and a Dubbo local, she’s hoping for a huge crowd on Saturday to cheer all three Demons teams on.

“I tell everybody that I know to come down, and we do get a lot of support at home games, we get a lot of spectators who don’t play with us but come along and enjoy the atmosphere anyway.”

“Us women, we’ve won the last three grand finals in a row and we’ve had to do it in Bathurst, so we’ve had to do it in the face of monumental Bathurst support so it’d be so good to have a home crowd egging us on this weekend.”

But when the weekend was over, she believes that it’s local girls and women who are the winners.

“Probably just that the biggest factor in women and girls staying in sport is community and culture, and that’s our focus here at the Demons,” she said.

“We love to win also, but our biggest motivator is keeping women and girls playing sport and getting out there on the football field.

“We’ve got juniors here, young women in our team who’ve played 100 games for the club already and they’re only 18 and 19. We’ve been getting them up from under-12s all the way through to senior women, and we love that there’s a pipeline for women to come through this club and play senior football.”

Tim McCloud coaches the womens’ team and, for him, it’s been a very roundabout journey to end up in Dubbo.

Born in South Australia before moving to Melbourne and then Sydney in his younger years, meeting his wife and then moving to Dubbo to be closer to her family as well as for a country lifestyle change.

“My wife got invited to join the footy club and I couldn’t keep myself away, at which point I just got the itch and got back into it – this is my second year as senior coach for the women’s team and my third year back playing footy,” and he says the huge run of success comes off the back of the incredible culture in the women’s team.

“They have led the way over the past 10 years in their culture, and especially in the last four to five years, led the way in culture and success on the field - the men’s team have very openly said that they have learned a lot from the women’s team, how they conduct themselves and how they play, and have fed off that success and that culture.

“Now the men’s team, from taking those lessons from our women, are seeing really great success in what they’re doing and will hopefully win a home grand final.”

Callum Schmidt is yet another key member of the club who was hoping for a strong turnout of Rugby League and Rugby Union fans to support a fellow Dubbo club and he believes many people who’ve never watched a game were surprised at the spectacle, growing up in Temora he said he and his mates played both AFL and League.

“Numbers-wise, yeah, pretty even split in Temora, when you’re younger, you definitely mix and match heaps, I played 12 years of league, and then I think I was about 16 or 17 when I made the move to AFL to play with my mates when we decided to try and stack the under-18 side and I got the love of it there, it just hit me and never went away."