Dees to face Roos in memorial match

Originally published in the Dubbo Photo News

The Dubbo Demons will have two senior teams on the road to Tumbarumba this weekend for the annual Izac Cornell Memorial. This will be the 12th such match.

Izac was a first-grade player at Dubbo and won a premiership with the senior men’s team. He is remembered as a dedicated coach and clubman.

After leaving Dubbo Izac headed home to Tumbarumba where he continued to play Australian football before his untimely death in 2009.

Demon’s player Lauren Hazell said he made an indelible mark on the Dubbo club.

“The thing I love about him the most was that he treated me the same as the guys.”

Ms Hazell first played for Dubbo as a junior player following encouragement from Izac, paving the way for other girls in the region.

“I was just a player. Izac saw it for what it was – it wasn’t ‘okay, we can’t let her go in, she’ll get tackled.’ I wanted to have a crack and he took me in and gave me that opportunity.”

Mr Cornell advocated for Ms Hazel from her first season as a player. She said that his work to get her into football helped put the idea of girl’s football into heads across the central west.

“Out of the blue he came up to me one week and said: ‘Oh, we’ve got the Central West rep squad trials coming up and I’ve put you forward.’ I didn’t even know it was a thing, and I was the first girl ever to play on that side!

“I guess from there it was like, wow, I can do what the boys are doing.”

With girl’s football still in its infancy, Ms Hazell soon aged out of the league, but the chance that Izac took on her sparked a love for the game she has continued to play.

“Just having that conversation back in 2007 was ground-breaking. The next year we had a couple of girls join. A few girls started to trickle through and then the AFLW picked up and five years or so later, people really went ‘oh yeah, girls footy is a thing.’ So, I think we should be acknowledging that Izac really started women’s footy out here.”

Early iterations of the memorial match saw the women playing netball, but in recent years they’ve moved onto the footy field.

“The fact we’ve been able to do a little scratch match with them has been really cool. It’s nice to be involved and be able to touch back on his impact. I don’t think I would have ever played. He started it,” a grateful Lauren said.

This weekend will feature two matches with the senior women’s and men’s teams playing.

“We had hoped to include a junior match for the first time however it was withdrawn due to player availability issues.”

This will be the Dubbo Demon’s first hit out since the 2021 season was cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions and it will tip off the delayed 40th anniversary celebrations.