Musings from the Shitter: Volume Seventeen

Dear Feilding Women’s Socials,
From the Subs Coordinator

I know there are still two weekends left in the season. Maybe it’s too early to be writing something like this…maybe you’re supposed to wait until the final whistle before trying to name what something meant. But sometimes, when you see it clearly enough, you have to say it while it’s still happening. While it’s still alive and unedited. This isn’t about the end of a story. It’s about recognising something mid-chapter…before memory can tidy it up or turn it into a highlight reel.

From April through to now, I’ve watched this team…the Feilding United Women’s Socials, play in the 2nd Division…and what I’ve seen isn’t just football. It’s not just the scores or the formations or the slow rhythm of a season unfolding. What I’ve seen is something harder to name. Something that, if you stand back far enough and look at it with the right kind of eyes, looks a lot like trust.

And trust, real trust, is never obvious. It doesn’t get posted to Instagram or win end-of-season trophies. It doesn’t announce itself in a huddle or a halftime speech. It shows up in subtler, less sexy ways…in the pass made to someone out of frame, in the shoulder offered instead of a critique, in the run made that nobody sees until three touches later when it opens the entire pitch. It builds incrementally, like sediment. And then, all at once, you realise it’s there, holding the whole thing up.

This team is a mixture of youth and experience. Of players who know the feel of their own limits and players who haven’t yet run into theirs. What’s rare is that this difference…this gap…hasn’t fractured them. It’s bound them. It’s created the possibility for something honest, something durable.

Because the experienced players this year didn’t just lead…they handed over weight. And the younger ones didn’t just follow…they picked it up. Sometimes clumsily, sometimes with hesitation. But they took it. And then they came back the next week and took it again.

I’ve seen teams fake this. I’ve seen surface-level cohesion and team-bonding nights and slogans and matching gear and all the visual cues that people use to say “We are a team.” This wasn’t that. This was slower. Stranger. Messier. Better.

If they stay together…and I hope they do, Fuck I hope they do, all of them...the experienced, the new, the ones who know deep down they have the technical ability to play higher, whatever that means…I think this team becomes the one that other teams not only fear but envy. Because skill is replicable. Systems can be copied. But trust? Actual interdependent, resilient, ego-shedding trust? That’s rare. That’s what makes a team a team.

Next season, these women will be better than they were this year. That’s not optimism. That’s physics. Because trust is a multiplier. It deepens effort. It forgives mistakes. It makes space for risk, and risk is where growth lives.

And to finish in the top four? That’s not an accident. That’s not just a happy coincidence or the result of a few lucky weekends. That’s the visible part. The scoreboard part. The kind of success that gets recorded in tables and newsletters and maybe a shoutout at the club prizegiving. But the truth underneath…the thing that doesn’t fit into the stat sheet…is that finishing in the top four is just the outer layer of something deeper.

That’s the sign of trust, of consistency, of people showing up when they could’ve stayed home. That’s the result of a hundred invisible decisions…passing instead of shooting, picking someone up instead of walking away, showing up on the bad days. That’s what trust looks like when it gets measured.

To be in the top four is success, yes. It’s the kind of success you can point to. But to understand why you’re there… to know what built it, what it cost, and what it means?

That’s the secret.
And this team…this team…knows.

I could name names. I could list individual moments of grace or grit or kindness that I’ve seen on and off the pitch. I could tell each player exactly what I witnessed…who stepped up, who lifted others, who carried themselves differently in August than they did in April. But I won’t do that here. Some truths deserve smaller rooms. If they want to know, I’ll tell them. Quietly. Where it can land properly.

But I will say this…those moments, those Sundays…they’re trapped now. In me. In memory. The drive through Dannevirke isn’t just a drive anymore. It’s where you played in shirts bought from The Warehouse. Where a patch of grass I used to call mine became the place I watched my daughter score her first goal. And that changes things. That makes it permanent.

And when the season ends…and it will…I know I’ll wake up one Sunday unsure of what to do. A gap in the calendar that used to mean something. But maybe, my daughter and I will take a ball and go find a patch of grass and kick it around. Maybe we’ll talk about the year that was, and maybe we’ll talk about the one we hope is coming. Because that’s the thing about football…it keeps offering you the future.

And if it doesn’t? If it all ends? Then it was still worth it.

Because I saw something rare this year. I saw something that looked a lot like trust.

And if that’s all it was, that would be enough.
But I don’t think that’s all it is.
I think it’s just the beginning.