Australian Football

Stephen Schwerdt was a clubman par excellence for Central District for well over a decade and one imagines that few members of the Bulldog fraternity would have worn wider smiles when the club made its longer overdue accession to premiership status in 2000. Mind you, that smile would have been wider still had Schwerdt, who retired in 1998, still been playing league football.

Recruited locally from Elizabeth, Schwerdt had debuted for Centrals in 1986, and unhesitatingly risked life and limb in the red, white and blue cause in a total of 212 senior games. Between 1992 and 1994 he augmented his SANFL career with intermittent appearances for the Adelaide Crows, where he certainly never seemed out of his depth, and would, one imagines, have been a trifle less than satisfied with a final tally of just 25 AFL games. Schwerdt’s courage, never in doubt at the best of times, was particularly conspicuous during the early 1990s, with his stint with the Crows coming immediately after a season which had seen him suffer one of football’s most horrific injuries, a broken jaw, before fighting his way back to fitness only to suffer an identical injury almost immediately.

When he was able to apply himself exclusively to Central District once more Schwerdt produced some of the finest and most consistent football of his career, highlighted by a club best and fairest award in his final season. Besides his club games, he represented South Australia three times.

Author - John Devaney