Col Knight isn’t your everyday volunteer.
He is so dependable; the Noble Park Football Club has gone to the effort of creating a suave sign for his well-ran bar.
And it’s common around the Bull pit that the recently added scoreboard is not aimed at the Robert Bell Pavilion…but at Col’s Bar.
In a rare moment of spare time at a home game, and after thorough thought, Knight looked back at where his time at Pat Wright Oval begun.
“My son played in under-16s, I have to think how old he is now… he is 44,” he said.
“I was a member here before that, but I wasn’t involved in the footy as much as I was until he played in the under-16s.
“Originally I started cooking the BBQ for the senior players. I got involved with all that and it went from there.”
Knight spends a fair chunk of his week at the footy club, helping out with his main role of the bar, but also assisting in anything the club requires.
And like every volunteer, he was modestly uncomfortable to share the amount of hours he spends at the club.
“Sh*t… home games all day,” he whispered, with unnecessary guilt.
“During the week I come down some Tuesday and Thursday nights for training, and I was here all night Friday stocking the fridges.
“It just has great people, you get involved with everyone and it’s great.
“Lots of good footballers, lots of great things, the way everyone goes, I’ve done the kids Christmas party for…I don’t even know how many years now.”
About twelve paces from the front of Col’s Bar is the senior oval, and while he mentioned the club has ‘good footballers’, Knight admitted he probably isn’t in a position to judge how good they are.
“I don’t know, I am too busy,” was his response to who his favourite player was.
“Last week I didn’t even know they had a kid’s game at half-time, I had to ask the score, all I got told is there was three games (against Berwick) and we won all three.
“I have never seen a full game.
“I am a life member. They used to say can you do the votes for the best and fairest, and I said ‘to do that I have to watch the game’.
“They said ‘you don’t watch the game?’ and I said ‘NO!’.”
Though the Bulls recorded one of their better wins in recent memory on the weekend, it is unlikely Col Knight caught a glimpse of the great display that his club put on.
