FOOTBALL Wagga have encouraged clubs to put forward any suggestions as to how to deal with the latest washout.
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For the second time in the past month, Football Wagga decided to postpone a weekend's round due to the wet weather across the region.
But the second postponement has caused a problem with the draw as Football Wagga only allowed one 'washout round', a spare weekend towards the end of the season used to play any catch-up games.
Round nine, a washout, has already been moved to the spare weekend of August 14-15, leaving last weekend's round 12 up in the air.
The round is only of particular concern to the first and second grade men and first grade women's competition, in terms of how it affects the season draw.
Football Wagga president Tony Dobbin explained that clubs will be consulted before a decision is made on the round.
"We want clubs to come up with other options," Dobbin said.
"Clubs have already said midweek games have difficulties because, off the top of my head, if Young has to play in Tumut for example, that can be difficult for midweek games.
"We'll look at all options."
Dobbin floated the concept of double headers as a possibility.
"It may end up being one of the options put out already, which is maybe we've got to play a couple of double headers," he said.
"You play one of your rounds on a Saturday and then another on a Sunday. That's an option but nothing is settled yet."
Football Wagga has ruled out extending the season, which is scheduled to finish with grand finals on the last weekend of September.
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"We'll have to make a decision because we're locked into the grand final date," Dobbin said.
"Like every sport, you have your locked in season, people make plans, holidays, school holidays, you can't just say you're going to extend it by two weeks.
"COVID was totally different, we did, but that was totally different. It's a hard one and it will get worse if we have to scrap another round. If there is another wet weekend."
Dobbin said while Football Wagga has already began discussions with clubs, he stressed there was no need to rush any decision.
"We'll look to make a decision as soon as we can but it's still about eight rounds away," he said.
"It's not as though we have to say by this Monday at 5pm we need to know what happens because in essence we have a bit of breathing space because it's still not until the end of August.
"Let's have a think about it, do it rationally and see what else pops up."
Dobbin also defended Football Wagga's process around cancelling games amid some criticism over the weekend.
Rather than calling off the entire schedule, Football Wagga opted to go competition by competition until their worst fears were confirmed.
"What we did different this time to what we've done in the past, we thought ok, we've got 44 matches to plan over the competition footprint...so what we did we started during the day to peel off competitions," Dobbin explained.
"We cancelled men's fourth grade on Friday night to start with and thought maybe if they don't play, we'll get junior games in on Saturday. And then a couple of hours later it was pretty evident we couldn't get the juniors going so we cancelled those. Then we cancelled men's third grade on Saturday, hoping something might be available for the women's and men's senior grades on Sunday and we just dropped the games off over a period of about four hours.
"The second last thing we did was we said we'll try for the men's first grade and second grade on Sunday afternoon but the only reason we did that is because they're the last games on Sunday."
Meantime, the opening round of the Creed and Shipard school competitions, scheduled for Monday, were also washed out.
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