Doutta Stars

Doutta Stars Football Club represents the residential areas of West Essendon and Niddrie. Its teams have played their home matches at the same venue, Buckley Park, since the club’s first season as members of the Essendon District Football League in 1946. In the six decades that have elapsed since, Doutta Stars has been by some measure the league’s most successful club in open age competition. It won a premiership in only its third season, en route to four in a row, which included an unbeaten flag in 1949. By the end of the 1950s the club had featured in no fewer than a dozen senior grand finals, from eight of which it had emerged victorious.

Success continued to arrive thick and fast during the 1960s with five further senior flags from six grand final appearances. Since then, premierships have been more thinly spread, but this is hardly surprising in such a high quality competition. During the late 1990s the senior team suffered the ignominy of relegation to B grade for the first time, but its recovery was both speedy and emphatic. In 1998 it won the grand final of B grade, and the following year made it a noteworthy sequence of back to back wins when it procured its eighteenth A grade flag.

Over the years, a number of Doutta Stars footballers have progressed to the V/AFL, with Alan Dale (Essendon), David Johnston (Melbourne), Peter Filandia (Sydney) and Leigh Tudor (Geelong) being perhaps the best known.

In 2006, the Stars seniors comfortably qualified for the A Grade finals in second place, but lost badly in both the second semi final and grand final to Strathmore. The following year they plummeted to seventh position on the ladder after managing just half a dozen wins from their 18 home and away matches, while a similarly disappointing showing in 2008 precipitated the departure of coach Brian Gray, although whether he went voluntarily or was pushed was unclear.