For the Hay family, Australian football is simply part of their life.
Roy is an Australian football historian and author, whose contribution is so prolific he is in Football Australia’s Hall of Fame.
That passion flowed on to his son Ross, but if it wasn’t for Sydney FC’s work in the community with the Sydney FC Foundation, he might never have got to share the same experience with his own son, Oscar.
The Sydney FC Foundation puts on community programs that aim to drive inclusion, confidence, leadership and lifelong participation in sport across Powerchair Football and two other powerful missions, Empower Me (for participants with special needs) and Sky’s Her Limit (working with young girls through the power of sport).
“(Empowers Me) gives Oscar and in turn, I guess myself, a chance to continue on what I would have wanted to do if I didn’t have the challenge of a beautiful, unique individual like Oscar,” Ross explained to football360.com.au.
“If I had a neurotypical son, I would vicariously probably live through him playing soccer and hopefully he loved it in the same way that I did. I think that’s really powerful for Oscar to enjoy and love the aspects of the game that he enjoys but that social environment allows him to be able to do that with the challenges that he has.”
Oscar, now 18, has been part of the program since he was 10 and is now besotted with football. He was entranced by the World Cup in 2023, with Mary Fowler his favourite player, and is part of the Balmain Tigers All Abilities Program.
When he gets to play in programs at Sky Park, just metres from his heroes, it sums up the inclusivity of the work the Foundation is doing.
Ross, centre, speaking at a Sydney FC Foundation event earlier this year about the program’s impact on his family.
“A couple of the Sydney FC guys have come to talk at things and listen to some of the stories and some of them are quite blown away by the fact that they’ve got touch points to people in that non neurotypical environment,” he said.
He continued: “It makes it real that there’s a process of getting involved in something very community based. It’s good for our non neurotypical children to be involved in that because it can be quite an insular life if you don’t involve them in those more community based activities where inclusion is part of it.
“I talked to my dad, and obviously my dad was inducted to the Hall of Fame for his involvement with the FA and from an academic and historical viewpoint.
“He likes the fact that he can see that the trade of the Hay family is still being involved in soccer in some way, shape or form – that wouldn’t be the case if there wasn’t places like the Sydney FC Foundation, which is very, very enjoyable and rewarding for everybody in the Hay family, Oscar primarily, but everybody else gets to see and benefit and enjoy Oscar’s enjoyment in that.”
If ever anyone needed a reminder of the social importance of sport and the potential role A-League clubs can play in our communities, Sydney FC Foundation Chair Jenny Abood explains her mission with incredible passion.
“(It stemmed from Sydney FC Owner and Director and Sydney FC Foundation Director) Alina Barlow’s vision to use the power of football to change lives,” she explained.
“We wanted to make sure that people who would otherwise miss out can access all those benefits of social health and confidence building that they wouldn’t usually receive.
“Sydney FC obviously has success on the field. And that gives us a platform, right? We want people to realise that it’s more than just about winning trophies; the Sydney FC Foundation is about what happens off the field.
“Our success isn’t measured truly by trophies. Our success is measured in each child that gains more confidence, the barriers that are broken down and opportunities created for people who otherwise would just miss out.
“That’s what it always comes down to. They would not get this if it wasn’t for having a foundation. We feel that football just has so much to offer and through our programs we’re engaging, we’re enriching and we’re empowering people, young women, children with disabilities, kids who who can’t walk, who have muscular dystrophy and in power chairs, who’ve got limited use of their upper bodies.
“We believe that a successful football club shouldn’t only be just measured by what happens in the 90 minutes on the weekend. It should also be measured by the positive impact it has on the community that it supports.”
Football has a unique role to play, Abood adds.
“Governments and charities, they’ve got important roles to play. But football clubs bring something different: connection, inspiration and engagement.
“If I’ve got players with me, women or the men, young people are not going to listen to a politician or a policy document, or a teacher sometimes, but they’ll listen to a Sydney FC player. It’s crazy. And that’s just really a powerful opportunity, we believe, to create positive change.”
Sydney FC players head out to events, will see what it’s like in a power chair, run clinics; there are three A-League Women players who are trained to go to schools where there is social disadvantage.
The Foundation started with a focus on Power Chair, when alongside Alex Reilly, Jenny kitted out a team playing under Sydney FC’s name with proper kits in 2021.
She continued: “We started lobbying for them to get help with NDIS to get them power chairs and things like that. So it started there. Then we saw schools for kids with disabilities started to lose their funding from the government for sports programs.
“So these kids were sitting in the classroom because they didn’t have any sport to play. So we decided that we would create a program where we would go out to schools with these children with special needs and we would run programs for them to participate in.
“And then it just started growing from there to the extent that we then wanted to do that in holiday clinics because we used to run holiday clinics for children with no disabilities. So we thought, ‘Why shouldn’t we start running these holiday clinics for children with all abilities?’”
Last year, that work crescendoed with 4,459 participants across all their programs.
The highlights are plentiful.
83% of girls in the Sky’s Her Limit program said they’ve been inspired by their participation, with 72% saying it encouraged them to remain active in sport.
“88% of our Empower Me participants reported improving their confidence,” she beamed.
“I can’t tell you the impact that it has on families.”
A beautiful story to end with is of Jacob.
“Jacob has autism and wasn’t even a football fan,” Jenny explains.
“He’d never played football, never was interested in football. It really brought such an amazing impact on his life.
“…he really wasn’t much of a talker, but football really engaged him. And when he sees me, he will talk to me about football now.
“He’s become a massive Sydney FC fan, which is great, – it doesn’t matter who they follow, but he’s become a great Sydney FC fan.
“I said to him: what made you do that? And he said to me, Jake Cohen, who works for our foundation, made me love football. So it’s not just the players, it’s the person coming out delivering the program as well.
“I took him up to the Sky Blue Lounge back then and brought his family along with him and they had the most wonderful day and we took them down to the sideline and he met Joe Lolley, and I swear to you, it was like as though he’d met the King
“He couldn’t say enough about Sydney. And this is a kid who’d hardly spoken. Here he was just speaking with all this confidence to Joe Lolley on the sideline.”
“What I really, really want to bring home is that we’re reaching people that the governments, schools and other charities just can’t.
“At the end of the day, families trust their club. The supporters feel connected to it, players are role models, and with that reach comes a responsibility to give back in a meaningful way.
“And I don’t think that’s just about the club doing that, but I think that supporters and fans of football should do so because they all know what the power of football really is and how it can unite and how it can empower, engage and enrich.”
Hay, who also singled out the work of Jake Cohen, who does an annual 100km walk from Bondi to Barrenjoey to fund raise, added: “No matter what your challenge is, it’s good to be part of a clan or a community and that’s what Sydney FC Foundation is trying to do through all of the different realms it’s grown into.”
He continued: “It’s a social conscience thing…somewhere within your community there is somebody who would benefit from a program like Sydney FC Foundation.
“There’s always a case of within one or two degrees that you’ve got somebody who’s got some non neurotypical challenges and you can help by supporting or involving yourself in the foundation, however that is. Through just talking about it, keeping the word out there or actually putting your hand in your pocket to help.”