Tallon Smith
A major change is coming for the rugby league scene in Taree after the Taree City Bulls senior club agreed to merge with the Taree Panthers juniors to form the Taree City Panthers ahead of the 2026 season.
The change, which will create a single club for junior and senior football in the region competing in Group 3, follows numerous other examples which have been a raging success.
Taree Panthers JRLFC President and former NRL Referees Coach Bernard Sutton said that the development is the beginning of an “exciting” new chapter for the game in the city.
“It really started off [with] a ‘State of the League’ meeting here in Taree and it involved all the rugby league clubs in Taree, Taree Panthers Junior League, which I’m the president of, the Taree City Bulls, which is the senior club, and also Taree Red Rovers, which is the other junior club in town,” he said.
“It was really just to have a look at where we currently sit, and we’re always supposed to be aligned to Taree City Bulls, both the junior league clubs, and our players are supposed to feed through, but we’ve seen in recent years that that hasn’t necessarily happened.
“One of the things we identified was that there wasn’t a great connection between the senior league and the junior league teams, and that’s something that we need to address for the sake of footy in Taree.
“Taree Red Rovers, they’ve got a lot of history, they’ve been around for about 60 years and they decided that they wanted to stand alone, and we respect their decision.
“But we stepped back as Taree Panthers junior league and thought, there’s an opportunity here for our junior players to connect with the senior guys and there’s also a benefit for the senior league to create that smoother flow of players and have the juniors actually identify with the senior club and wear the same jerseys, have the same logos and grow up wanting to continue to be, it’s going to be Taree City Panthers for their whole career.”
With a number of other clubs in the Group 3 competition within close proximity to Taree offering alternative options as to locations to play senior footy, the Bulls have lost many talented local juniors to clubs such as Wingham and Old Bar in recent years.
Sutton said that the aim of the new merged club is to combat this by creating a “streamlined process” for juniors to transition into senior football within Taree itself.
“Taree, it’s a regional centre, Old Bar is approximately 15 kilometres away and Wingham is probably a similar distance in the opposite direction,” he said.
“So there’s a number of clubs and they’re real growth areas, Old Bar has just exploded in the last few years following the COVID situation in population, and they’ve become attractive little places, for kids who weren’t necessarily connected to their senior club to go and play with other school friends and things that are from Wingham and Old Bar.
“We’re really trying to reverse that trend and connect them with the seniors so there’s more incentive for them to want to stay here in Taree and continue to play their football within Taree.”
When it comes to club identity, a logo has already been released, while a jersey design is in the works ready for the club’s launch following the conclusion of this season.
“We have adopted some colours and it’ll be black and gold, the strip,” he said.
“The jersey is still in design at the moment, and we will have an official club launch where we’ll do an unveiling of the jersey.
“I can’t give too much away on that, but it is in the pipeline and we’ll have our own event actually [that] we’re looking at [in] November.
“We want to wrap the current season up, obviously, the Taree City Bulls are still playing and our junior club is still in the middle of semi-finals, so we want to finish off strong with our respective clubs, and then we’ll turn our attention to launching Taree City Panthers.”
Sutton said that the club will be set up with a simple but effective structure, with a board of seven directors overseeing the whole club, with junior and senior presidents under that umbrella to run the two divisions of rugby league.
“The structure of it, we’ve set it up very much like a business,” he said.
“We’re going to have a board of directors, and we actually have our AGM next week where we’ll hopefully install up to seven directors.
“We’re looking very much further afield than just rugby league to get those directors, we want to build a club that’s financially viable and successful for a number of years to come.
“We’re looking for people who are very much into marketing, financial growth, all those types of things.
“There’ll obviously be people around that have got some footy knowledge, but very much on the board, we want to see some business growth minds.
“Then underneath that we’ll have a junior football department and there’ll be a senior football department, each of which will have their own presidents.
“But importantly, they’re very much unified under the one board who oversee the strategy and direction.”
The Panthers will begin play in Group 3 Seniors and Juniors next year, while the Red Rovers, famously the junior club of NSW Blues star Latrell Mitchell, will continue to compete in the junior competition as the city’s second side.
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