Ovens & Murray FNL adopts TidyConnect across all 10 clubs

Running a community football and netball club shouldn’t feel like a second job.

For most volunteers across Australian community sport, it does. Committee members put long hours into admin alone. Tenure in key roles is short. And when a volunteer walks out the door, they take everything with them: contacts, context, institutional knowledge, all stored in their inbox and their head.

The Ovens & Murray Football Netball League is doing something about it.

A league that looked in the mirror

Late in 2025, the OMFNL commissioned an independent review from Clubmap covering how the league and its clubs actually operate. No spin. No cherry-picking. Just honest data from across the competition.

The findings confirmed what anyone who has run a community club already knows.

Volunteer recruitment and retention were rated the most pressing challenge across the board. Clubs were under significant financial and operational pressure, and the systems supporting them had not evolved at the pace the demands have. Information was flying around in emails, WhatsApp threads, and spreadsheets, with no clear audit trail and no way of knowing what had been read, acted on, or forgotten.

The OMFNL did not shelve the report. They acted on it.

What TidyConnect is

TidyConnect is the federation layer of TidyHQ. It connects a sporting league or governing body to its affiliated clubs, providing structured task assignment, role-based communications, club health visibility, and shared governance templates, while letting each club retain control of its own day-to-day operations.

TidyHQ has been working with sporting governing bodies and their clubs across Australia for years. The platform is built specifically for the federation problem: how does a league stay connected to its clubs without drowning everyone in noise?

The answer isn’t more emails. It’s structured communication.

What the OMFNL is solving

"We’ve been communicating with our clubs the same way for 15 years. The independent review confirmed what we already felt. When we saw clubs already picking up TidyHQ on their own, we knew it was time to get everyone on the same page." - Kane Arendarcikas, General Manager, OMFNL

TidyConnect gives the OMFNL a central hub to:

• Assign tasks to clubs with deadlines, context and a full audit trail. Working with Children checks, concussion frameworks and affiliation requirements get tracked and timestamped, not chased by email.
• Send targeted communications so the right message reaches the right role at the right club. No more blasting every president with information meant for the treasurer.
• See the health of every club in real time so the league can spot a struggling committee before it becomes a problem.
• Share governance templates so a new club president doesn’t have to figure out what a quorum is from scratch. The league sets the standard. The clubs use it.

And critically, clubs keep their own space. TidyConnect is built on the principle that a governing body should have enough visibility to be helpful, not enough to step over the constitutional boundaries each club is built on. The moment a club starts to feel like the league is Big Brother, the trust is gone.

"A lot of my week was spent chasing responses, following up emails, checking who’d seen what, working out which clubs still had things outstanding. Now I can see where every club is at without picking up the phone." - Michael Bocquet, Operations Manager, OMFNL

Important scope note: TidyConnect handles off-field governance and administration. It is not a competition management or player registration system. The OMFNL’s match-day operations, fixtures, ladders and player records continue to run on the platforms purpose-built for that work.

What this looks like in practice

A new club president logs in on a Tuesday night. She sees exactly what the league needs from her club this week. She assigns the concussion accreditation task to the trainers coordinator. She sees the Hall of Fame dinner RSVP is due Friday. She doesn’t dig through 47 emails. She gets it done in 20 minutes and gets back to her family.

That’s the goal.

The 10 clubs of the Ovens & Murray FNL

The rollout covers every club in the competition. Three football grades, four netball grades, ten clubs across the Albury-Wodonga-Wangaratta border region.

• Albury Football Club (Tigers)
• Corowa-Rutherglen Football Netball Club (Roos)
• Lavington Panthers Football Netball Club (Panthers)
• Myrtleford Alpine Saints Football & Netball Club (Saints)
• North Albury Football Club (Hoppers)
• Wangaratta Football Club (Magpies)
• Wangaratta Rovers Football Netball Club (Hawks)
• Wodonga Football Club (Bulldogs)
• Wodonga Raiders Football Club (Raiders)
• Yarrawonga Football Netball Club (Pigeons)

Most of these clubs already use TidyHQ to run their day-to-day operations. TidyConnect simply connects them: league to clubs, clubs to each other, everyone working from the same source of truth.

Why other leagues should pay attention

The OMFNL is not the first competition to make this move. The Perth Football League rolled out TidyConnect across its 74 clubs and went live five weeks before round one. Most clubs didn’t even notice the change. They just started receiving better communication from their league.

If you run a regional football league, a netball association, a state sporting body, or any federated sporting community in Australia, New Zealand or the United Kingdom, the OMFNL story should look familiar. The volunteer model is under pressure everywhere. The systems most leagues use to support clubs were never designed for this scale of administrative load. And custom in-house builds rarely survive the funding cycle that created them.

There is a better-tested path: federate the work, share the load, give every club the same governance baseline.

Football and netball leagues face the same pattern across Australia, regardless of state or competition tier: club presidents and treasurers turn over every two or three years, compliance requirements grow each season, and league administrators spend most of the week chasing email replies. TidyConnect was built specifically for this problem. It gives the league a structured way to assign tasks, share governance templates, and see which clubs need help, without taking over how each club runs. If you administer a regional football league, a netball association, a peak governing body, or any federated sporting community where clubs report up to a competition, TidyConnect is the platform built for your shape of work.

The bigger picture

The OMFNL has been part of north-east Victoria’s sporting landscape since 1893, when it was founded in Rutherglen. Today the competition crosses the state border. Clubs based in Victoria sit under AFL Victoria. Albury and North Albury, on the New South Wales side, sit under AFL NSW/ACT. Three football grades. Four netball grades. Ten clubs. Thousands of people who live and breathe Ovens and Murray football and netball.

The competition isn’t going anywhere. But the way volunteers experience running it, that can change.

This partnership is a step toward a league where the admin works for the people doing it, not against them.

We’re proud to be part of it.

Learn more about TidyConnect at tidyhq.com/connect.

Frequently asked questions

What is TidyConnect?

TidyConnect is the federation layer of TidyHQ. It connects a sporting league or governing body to its affiliated clubs, providing structured task assignment, role-based communications, club health visibility and shared governance templates, while letting each club retain control of its own day-to-day operations.

Which competitions use TidyConnect?

Australian leagues using TidyConnect include the Perth Football League and the Ovens & Murray Football Netball League.

Does TidyConnect replace player registration or fixturing systems like PlayHQ?

No. TidyConnect handles off-field governance and administration: tasks, communications, compliance tracking, governance templates and club health monitoring. Match-day operations, player registration, fixtures and ladders continue to run on the platforms designed for those purposes.

What problems does TidyConnect solve for a regional football netball league?

The most common problems are chasing email responses with no audit trail, sending information to the wrong people at clubs, lack of visibility into which clubs are healthy and which are struggling, inconsistent governance practices across clubs, and the loss of institutional knowledge when a volunteer steps down.

How does TidyConnect compare to building something custom?

A custom platform requires significant build budget, ongoing maintenance and rarely survives the funding cycle that created it. TidyConnect is purpose-built for the federation problem and is already in production across Australian sporting communities.