AFL Queensland faces an interesting conundrum with its plan to get a state league side based on the Sunshine Coast.

After the debut of the Sunshine Coast FC Fire yesterday, following on from the birth of the Sunshine Coast Stingrays and Sunshine Coast Sea Eagles in the two rugby codes, the AFL fears it is risking losing some ground on the Coast.

The Suncoast Lions, which plays in AFLQ’s top division, the Velocity Sports Cup, is now a Sunshine Coast team in name only.

Suncoast, which is the Brisbane Lions’ reserves side, no longer plays any home games on the Coast and only uses a few youngsters from this region as top-up players, although age restrictions mean the “older” Coast youngsters can’t get a game with them.

AFL on the Sunshine Coast’s senior flagships are two clubs, Maroochy/Northshore and Noosa, in the second tier Pineapple Hotel Cup, and Caloundra in what amounts to a third division.

It’s a situation AFLQ doesn’t want to continue long into the next decade and general manager Richard Griffiths, in the Daily on Friday, announced plans for a community forum on the Coast to get local feedback on how best to proceed with the plan to get a fully-fledged Coast team in division one.

Hopefully everyone associated with Coast footy, from the juniors up, will get involved.

Griffiths wants the new club to have the full support of the entire region and the league is prepared to fund a part-time administrator to get the foundations in place.

So what is the ideal scenario for Coast AFL?

League, rugby and soccer (or football if you prefer that term) have gone down the path of creating entirely new clubs, all of which are now based at Stockland Park at Kawana?

Is that what AFL should do as well?

My initial thoughts are “no”.

Setting up a new club may not be the preferred model and I believe promoting the Noosa Tigers would be the best option for a successful Sunshine Coast AFLQ franchise.

This may not immediately engage the whole Coast, but the best chance of achieving a thriving AFL team is by putting it in the part of the Coast which has the strongest Victorian influences and doesn’t have the direct competition from any state league side in any of the other codes.

Noosa, in my time on the Coast at least, has a history of playing in finals in division two, has just opened a new clubhouse and seems to have stability in its hierarchy – all factors which need to be taken into consideration during state league proposal discussions.

Setting up entirely new clubs, as the Stingrays and Sea Eagles have found, is hard and expensive work.

You start with virtually nothing, including a very low supporter base.
Success doesn’t come quickly.

Where league and rugby differed from AFL is that they had no teams already playing in Brisbane. All the senior clubs were taking part in a Coast competition.

Promoting one of them, and alienating all the others, was not really an option.

The Tigers already have a foothold in Brisbane and there’s only other one club, the Roos, who are on an equal footing.

A merger is one option, although an unlikely one.

It’s the Tigers for me.