Australian Football

With eleven senior grade flags and fourteen club championships to their credit the Seagulls have been by some measure the Geelong Football League’s most successful club. Founder members of the competition in 1979, the Shore reached the grand final on debut, but went down by 21 points to St. Mary’s. Amends were made in 1980 with a 14.11 (95) to 13.7 (87) grand final defeat of their previous season’s nemesis and a further flag was claimed in 1981 at the expense of Newtown and Chilwell.

When the Seagulls captured their fourth senior grade premiership in 1990 they confirmed their status as the league’s most successful club, in terms of flags won, up to that point. It is a status they have retained and indeed repeatedly reinforced ever since. The 1990s proved to be the decade in which the club’s dominance reached heights that were, by any standards, astonishing. Between 1995 and 2000 the Seagulls won every senior grade premiership on offer, most by means of resounding grand final triumphs. It is hard to imagine any GFL team ever rivalling this concerted period of pre-eminence. To date, South Barwon, which won three flags straight between 2005 and 2007 has come closest.

Back during its formative years of the 1930s North Shore competed in the Sub District Football League, claiming consecutive premierships in 1938 and 1939. The first of these flags was acquired in a conventional manner by means of a 12.9 (81) to 10.7 (67) grand final defeat of Queenscliff. However, the means by which the second came North Shore’s way was anything but conventional, with grand final opponents Queenscliff Garrison being confined to barracks owing to worrying developments in the war.

Following world war two the Seagulls affiliated with the Geelong and District Football League in which they would go on to claim a total of three top grade premiership triumphs. Such achievements, while meritorious, gave no real hint of what was to follow during the last two decades of the twentieth century and beyond. Continued success in football can never be guaranteed, however, and recent seasons have seen the Seagulls struggling as never before in their history. Since reaching the 2004 grand final, which they lost to St Mary’s by 27 points, their senior grade side has suffered an alarming decline in fortune. 

In 2005 they finished third, and there have been no finals appearances since. In 2006 they dropped to seventh, then down to ninth in 2007 and last with just a single win in 2008. Even worse was to follow, as in 2009 all three of the club’s grades - seniors, reserves and under eighteens - failed to garner a single win between them. Further wooden spoons followed in 2013 and 2014, while the team only narrowly avoided this ignominy in 2015 and 2016. The 2017 season brought significant improvement as the Seagulls climbed to seventh place on the twelve team premiership ladder after managing 7 wins from 18 matches for the year. The improvement was not maintained, however, as in 2018 only 4 wins were recorded and the team slipped two places to ninth.

Boasting a noteworthy past is all very well, and North Shore has every right to be proud of its achievements. However, it seems clear that quite a lot of work needs to be done if those achievements are to be augmented any time soon.