Ciantar hopeful of a bright future for Camden Tigers after flood recovery
Camden Tigers Football Club was formed in 1961 and has played their home matches at Ron Dine Memorial Reserve (Carbiz Stadium) in Camden South ever since.
The Men’s first grade side currently competes in the League Two Men’s competition, the third tier of men’s football in New South Wales.
However, during the 2021 and 2022 seasons while competing in the fourth-tier National Premier Leagues NSW Men’s 4 competition, the club was hit with four different waves of floods which devastated the area.
Camden Tigers FC President, Rod Ciantar, became the President in 2019 and described the floods and what he remembered from impact in 2021 and 2022.
“[I remember the] devastation, to be honest… with our club here, we pay to maintain the field,” Ciantar said.
“We probably spent $100,000-$120,000 here on this front field and to lose it all was just devastating… [it was] heart-breaking, really.”
The floods occurring once was tough for the club, but the club was hit by four floods over the two-year period; one in 2021 and three separate floods in 2022.
The damage caused by the back-to-back flood years took a big toll on the club.
“It damaged a lot of our equipment, damaged all our playing surfaces,” Ciantar said.
“One of the floods, we had just lay down the rye seed… and the very next day, it flooded and washed all away.
“Late on in the season, we were playing on fields with half rye seed and half no seed… financially, it was a big burden on our club.”
With Camden encompassing a larger community is south-western Sydney, from Leppington to Camden South to Cobbitty to Mount Annan, the Camden Tigers community banded together to help with the many flood reliefs.
“We have a great Camden Tigers community, so we all dug in,” Ciantar said.
“The committee and the members… we hosed the dressing sheds out.
“We’d sort of learned a lot because it’s not our first time being flooded, so we could see when it was coming.
“We’d done our best to prepare; we [used plastic on] all the dressing sheds… so we saved a little bit, but it was still devastating.”
For the families of the players, not just of the men’s first grade side but across the many teams the Tigers have, the club and home ground mean a lot to them.
“Camden Tigers is the oldest club in Macarthur… this has been our home [at Ron Dine Memorial Reserve] since 1961, so for us this is the community,” Ciantar said.
“We’ve never been a club that’s swapped and changed home grounds, this has always been our home ground.”
After overseeing the impacts of COVID-19 and multiple floods during his tenure as Club President, Ciantar said it was ‘the best’ to be back playing at their home ground.
“This is our fortress, this is where we come from,” Ciantar said.
“We’ve got a fantastic home record here at Ron Dine… not many clubs come here and take points off us and this is simply because of the local atmosphere.”
However, to get back to the point the field and facility are at currently, the club had to endure many hardships over that two-year period between 2021 and 2022.
“The stopping and the starting of football, the amount of [home] games that we missed out… we were hiring fields to train, we were hiring fields to play,” Ciantar said.
“We played a lot of home games at Valentine Sports Park, so we were hiring that off Football NSW.
“It was just not settling, not having to come back and to train, we were having to get alternate training fields from the Camden Council.
“There were even stages where we were training on concrete basketball courts; it was devastating but we got through it and we’re still here.”
The flood events happened after the 2020 season was cancelled due to COVID-19, meaning the club was affected year-on-year for three years.
“You think you can never get a break,” Ciantar said.
“You go through COVID and then you go through [the floods].”
However, the club did receive some major financial help.
“We had some good news last year where we got a big $1.5 million grant [from the NSW State Government], so we’re going to resurface the field, so hopefully it’s starting to turn back our way,” Ciantar said.
As for what is next for the club, the goal is to keep moving forward with all the support and resources they have.
“We’ll just keep pushing forward, it’s a great community, so we’ve got a lot of sponsors on board,” Ciantar said.
“We’re a really old brand football club; not only are we a League 2 Men’s club, we are a local Macarthur club, so we’re the biggest in the area.
“We’ve got like 1300 players playing for us.
“There’s not many football ground that are ten acres and four fields… so we’re very fortunate in a way that we’ve got the space.”
There is one simple idea that keeps Ciantar pushing forward in the role.
“It’s a battle every day but we do it because we love it, we love football, yeah?”
The Camden Tigers will be hoping to push forward this season after they were promoted from the now-defunct Football NSW League 3 Men’s competition at the end of last season.
“I would love to obviously, push them up into League One, for sure, I think we’ve got the quality in our first grade,” Ciantar said.
Speaking on the values and systems in place at the club, Ciantar spoke highly of the club’s youth system and hopes it will bring them future success.
“We are the kind of club that we promote our youth, [for example] we’ve got our first-grade goalkeeper [who] has been at the club since he [was] six years old, so he’s only ever played at one football club.
“That’s what we do at Camden Tigers, we don’t go and buy first-grade players, we produce them… we’ve got first-grade players that have been at the club since they were ten, eleven years old.
“We’re not the kind of club where we can spend $300-400 thousand on a first-grade squad because we’re a volunteer community club.”
Ciantar is proud of the club’s philosophy and wants it to continue.
“I get more pride out of producing and developing young players and we’ve done that for years at Camden Tigers, that’s where our success is,” Ciantar said.
“So, to get into League One would be fantastic.”
Heading into his fourth year as Club President, Ciantar has overseen some major chances at the club with many more to come.
“The main change I’ve done is building relationships, building relations with the council, relationships with other clubs,” Ciantar said.
“We’ve finally got lights put up at the back field where we’ve never had lights before, [we’ve got] the upgrade of the surface going in here.
“I think the biggest part of being the President is building relationships and making everyone happy.”
Ciantar has introduced and overseen multiple programs at the club which he is hoping to continue now with the events of the past few years behind them.
“We’ve introduced an Indigenous program, which is great for the community,” Ciantar said.
The program includes the Dharawal Cup, the Reconciliation Cup, and the Lyrebird Cup, which occurred this year during the Tigers’ ‘Festival of Football’ program they also run.
The first Dharawal Cup occurred last year and was hailed for its success.
The program, which ran its second year in 2023, also saw former Socceroo Craig Foster take part in the 2023 Reconciliation match between the Indigenous All-Stars and Camden Tigers.
Camden Tigers also prides itself on being a club that produces and promotes its own players, which is done in a few diverse ways.
“Being a community club, we don’t have a SAP (skill acquisition) program so we can’t produce our own League Two Men’s players.
“So, we have what we call the ‘Player Develop Program,’ which is in our local league, so we’ve got our 13s, 14s, 15s, 16s – they’re all what we call a ‘Player Development Program’.”
Ciantar explained the importance of the program for the club, especially moving forward.
“Then, players train with the League Two [squad] and this year in our youth system we’ve got half a dozen players from the local league coming through, so yeah, we like to keep it all in-house,” Ciantar said.
“We don’t have a SAP licence, so our elite teams start at 13s, it doesn’t start at under-9s like everyone else, so we have to produce it through our local club.”
Ciantar has plenty of belief and hope in the first-grade men’s squad this season to display their talent and push for promotion come the end of the season.
“Our players and our coaching staff are great,” Ciantar said.
“Our youth coaches and all our assistant coaches, [they’re] all minimum C-Licence – and they’re all a bunch of great coaches.”
Ciantar had high praise for the coaches within the Men’s first-grade team.
“These guys have been with us for a few years now, Gary [Seymour, Head Coach] and Dean [Bradley, Assistant Coach], they’re doing a good job,” Ciantar said.
“We’ve all got a great relationship, we love to win, that’s what it’s all about.
“They know the philosophy we want for this club and they’re doing a good job adhering to it.”
Regarding the floods and the potential impact they could have in the future and any safeguards that could be put in place, Ciantar has enquired about what needs to be done.
“It’s really hard to get safeguards from the Council because I’ve actually asked them to build levees and all that kind of stuff, but they won’t,” Ciantar said.
“Every time it rains, we sit and pray, there’s no safeguards.
“[There is] a creek that runs down the back [near the precinct]; you actually see it coming up, the creek overflows and then the water’s got to go somewhere.
“So, hopefully when it does get water on it, it drains pretty quick.”
Ciantar has looked at alternatives to help with any future potential flood or heavy rain events but is not close to having a solution.
“I actually asked to put a synthetic pitch down, because when you’re playing League Two football, nearly every club’s playing on synthetic now.
“The council however will not let us put a synthetic pitch down because of the flood zone.
“It’s like carpet, it will just float.”
Camden Tigers FC will look to push on and remain hopeful this season with the hopes of achieving promotion.
The floods could not dampen the community spirit at the club and its surrounding areas which shows a true representation of the hard-working nature of the area; one that does not give up.
With plenty of belief in the club after the hardships it has gone through over the past couple of years, the Tigers will be hopeful that the future is bright for them moving forward.
-By Dylan Costa
