Sharks end first season on a high

They may have finished ninth on the ladder, but the Dunsborough Sharks can walk off the field at the end of their first league season with their heads held high.

Sunday’s commanding win over Eaton was their fourth win, but it could easily have been their eighth if a few rolls of the dice had gone their way.

The Sharks made a habit of close calls, dropping four games by a goal or less. In just the club’s fifth league game, they tied with Bunbury on 69 points apiece. The plucky Dunsborough outfit led right up until the final quarter, where they went shot for shot with the Bulldogs to become the quickest team in league history to record a tied game.

As with their round 22 clash with Eaton, all of those games were made so close by the Sharks’ accuracy. They kicked 162 goals this season, making up 56.6 per cent of their total scoring kicks. (They kicked 124 behinds, for the stat nerds out there).

For comparison, top of the comp Busselton kicked 262 goals at 51.3 per cent – with 248 behinds. The accuracy by volume strategy clearly worked for Busselton, who finished the regular season with a for-against percentage over 200, but the Sharks’ straight kicking earned them a couple of wins over teams who spent more time in the forward 50.

They kicked 11.1 (67) to pull off the win in round 20 over the Harvey Bulls, who kicked 7.23 (65). It was a similar story against Eaton, where the sharks took a 48 point victory despite kicking two fewer scoring shots than the hosts.

Plenty of those came off the boot of Nic Reid. He placed equal 13th in the league for goal kicking, with 31 goals alongside Busselton’s Jaxon East.

Dunsborough had three players in the top 25 goal scorers. Chris White kicked 28, earning him 16th spot, and Jake Green rounded out the list with 17 goals.

However, it was Shayne Zanetti in the spotlight on Sunday, kicking four goals. Matthew Burgess kicked three, while Green, White and Reid contributed five between them.

The team’s efforts this year were compounded by the leadership of Coach Daniel Wiseman, and club president Mark Delane, who earned a nod as a finalist in the WA Football Commission’s volunteer of the year award.

His nomination cited his key role in uniting three Dunsborough clubs to form the Sharks as we know them today, with 23 junior and five senior teams.

It would have been easy to accept being at the bottom of the ladder in their first year, but the Sharks set themselves higher expectations than that. They got their hands on solid talent with the likes of Nic Reid in the forward line, former Eagle Pat McGinnity in the back, and even bringing Fremantle legend David Mundy down for a game early in the season.

They stuck it to the league’s most established clubs, with two close fights with Bunbury and HBL, and finishing well clear of Collie and Eaton.

The Sharks have plenty of reason to come back next season with high energy.