HUNDREDS of supporters in black and red bandanas, beating drums and waving banners descended on Oakes Oval for last year’s Football Far North Coast Grand Final series.

They had filled two coaches for the journey south to watch Burringbar Bandits FC claim its second senior men’s and senior women’s trophies since the club’s rebirth in 2023.

The Bandits’ men’s and women’s Championship League sides have all but booked their spots in this year’s finals, but trophies are only part of the attraction.

There are players, supporters, children running around, team songs, parties and The Black Pearl, the club’s bus, carrying the outfit around the Northern Rivers like a travelling circus.

And then there is the Field of Dreams, tucked between the hills and regularly veiled in late afternoon mist. The name began as a joke but has become an expression of belief in the club and the community around it.

For a few hours every week, tiny Burringbar becomes the centre of its own sporting universe.

For a few hours every week, the tiny hinterland town of Burringbar becomes the centre of its own sporting universe. Photo: David Cope.

 

The players spend the week doing ordinary jobs. On match day, they become Bandits.

Club president and men’s Championship League captain Kenta Shimizu remembers the reception after the team won the grand final in its first season back following an eight-year hiatus.

“We felt like heroes, honestly. We did feel like heroes,” he said.

Shimizu grew up playing football at Burringbar before leaving to pursue the game at a higher level.

When he returned after the 2022 floods, the town had gone eight years without a football club. He spearheaded its resurrection, with the Bandits returning in 2023.

Around that time, he walked into the clubhouse and encountered an older local man who had continued to frequent the sports club while the Field of Dreams lay dormant.

“He grabbed me, looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Thank you so much for bringing this back to Burringbar’,” Shimizu said.

Tom O’Connor Recreational Reserve, known within the club as the Field of Dreams (FOD), during match day. Photo: Michael Forrester.

 

The Bandits now have three men’s teams, two women’s teams and a growing junior program, while supporters travel across the region in winter for midweek catch-up matches.

“It’s not that they’re there for us. It’s like we’re on the field for them,” Shimizu said.

Western Sydney University lecturer Dr Andrew Grainger said grassroots sporting clubs could become important places where local identity and belonging were created.

“It can become a social institution through which people express who they are, where they belong, and what makes their community distinctive,” Grainger said.

Shimizu is wary of describing football simply as an escape from ordinary life.

“I don’t necessarily like that idea of the word escape because it suggests that something isn’t good where you’re coming from,” he said.

For some, he said, it was less about escaping than finding something to belong to.

“You could have an old man who is living at home where his kids and his grandkids, they’ve all gone away,” he said.

The Bandits now have three men’s teams, two women’s teams and a growing junior program. Photo: David Cope.

 

“He may not be trying to escape anything. Rather, he wants to be part of something.

“He wants to hold on to something. He wants to ride the wave that we’re riding.”

That belonging is reinforced through the club’s rituals and symbols: The Black Pearl, the team song, the colours and the Field of Dreams.

Shimizu said the name was a passing joke that stuck because it came to carry genuine weight.

“Someone threw it out there as a shits and giggles thing, but it quickly stuck, becoming an important reference to the place that means so much to us,” he said.

“To everyone at the club, the FOD reference may have a slightly different personal meaning, but what’s important is that it has meaning, much beyond a regular sports field.

“Which is why when we say the FOD, it’s not cheesy to us. It’s real.

“There’s nothing that can replicate that feeling of going to battle with your people that you care about.”