Mark Elphick is the kind of guy every club would love to have and that’s why The Gundagai Tigers love having him around. A veteran of the game who Captain Coaches Reserve Grade and still helps out First Grade on the bench when the club needs him, Elphick was awarded Life Membership of the Gundagai Tigers at their recent presentation night.
It has been a whirl-wind few week for the former half who transitioned into a Front Rower during his career but can play most positions in the side, even though he concedes he has slowed down a bit. With age comes experience and Elphick has been instrumental in the Tigers’ success over more than a decade and a half. He helped guide his side to a last minute win and premiership over Albury, got married to his partner Jade, received his life membership and then a honeymoon in the United States.
Not much gets past Elphick and he was aware that the prestigious award may be coming his way, when some of his fellow clubmen were asking questions about his career throughout the year.
He said, “I got worded up through the year that the Life Membership was going to happen, and they were asking a few too many questions through the year to not catch on that something was going on.
“Inductees were Marty (Martin Hay), Touty (David Tout) and myself and Chris Rose got officially inducted there, but he’d been inducted a few years before.
“Steve Rose and his sons Chris and Matt are all Life Members. Matt played over 300 First Grade games, Chris played over 200 and Steve was in the admin forever.
“It’s an honour and a privilege to be awarded. There’s not many people that get to do it and you have to be voted in as well. It’s an honour to be considered amongst the group of people who already are life members. It doesn’t happen every day that they induct someone else in.
Last week fellow Gundagai Tiger and Club President David Tout told the Gundagai Times that Elphick was pound for pound one of the toughest footballers going around.
“I’m not gifted with size so I have to have something I suppose”.
“I said to someone the other day, I wish I could be as experienced as I am now but go back ten or fifteen years ago with a lot more youth on my side, it would make football a hell of a lot easier.
“I don’t have the fitness or speed that I used to have, but the experience still enables you to get around a game of footy pretty well. Elphick joked, “I know when I can hide and when I can’t hide, but you don’t get that without experience.
“We won the grand final on September 22 and then the Friday after I married Jade, then we had the footy presentations and then I went overseas for our honeymoon for three weeks to America.
“Mum and Dad have a property just out of Gundagai on the river and we got married out there.
Elphick and fellow veteran Rhys Smart both found the year difficult as Father Time continues to take a little bit off them each year. Smart has navigated a difficult path through his career and didn’t play between the ages of 18 and 23 due to multiple surgeries, some reconstructive on shoulders and knees. He was glowing of his team mate when asked to contribute to this story.
He said, “ We played a lot of juniors together, when I was playing 15s he was playing up through the years.
“We played in a heap of grand finals together, I wouldn’t even know how many, but numerous Reggies ones anyway.
“He’s been a fella that just the way he coaches and the way he is makes you want to play for him.
“Even with his coaching and the way he speaks to his players he gets the best out of them.
“Towards the end of the year it was fairly taxing on our bodies and we leaned on each other to keep the motivation up and pull each other through.
“We were basically surviving the year in a lot of ways, just trying to get ourselves into the semis. Once we got into the semis we just kept encouraging each other.
“As long as we were helping each other out and going forward the boys had a bit of faith we could do the dirty stuff and they could run with it and score the points.
“I’m not sure how many tries Marky got this year, but I didn’t get one try this year and I think it’s the first time ever.
“We do the stuff, well Marky especially does the stuff that no-one else really wants to do and does it every week.
“He does get the recognition, but you probably don’t realise that he’s playing full games and all that sort of stuff, where as I’m like, right oh, I’ve done my thing, get me off.”
Rhys had a black eye on grand final day and looked pretty rough but it was his ankles which gave him the worst trouble.
“I also did my ankle against Albury in the first semi and I was battling with it and I ended up doing my other ankle in the next game and I was getting needles before the grand final.
“I wasn’t playing again at all and was just getting through and thinking that I’d love to send Marky out as a winner just for the things he’s done as well. I knew that it was my finish line. I knew it was my last couple of games and did what I had to do.
“The main thing for me is Marky is a fella that gets me there. He never asks, but you show up for him.
“I had a few injuries when I was younger, so I didn’t play from when I was 18 until I was 23.
“I got a shoulder reconstruction after 18s and had two years off and then I did my patella in my first game in a trial and then I had another two years off.
“I was never going to play again, just from missing work and then I sort of got back into it when I was 23 and pretty much played all the way through from then. I reckon if I had been able to keep on playing through those missed years I probably would have stopped when I was a little bit younger.
“I’ve had shoulder recos, broken legs, patel-las, anything you can name. I’m done now.
“Marky reckons he is going to play again. I hope he does as he’s achieved everything he can achieve. The thing that I like and he probably does to, is having a bit of a run and having a beer after the game, a bit old style!
“Our time for trying to play First Grade is past us now.
“I think Marky prides himself on getting young fellas ready to play First Grade. He likes to do that and teach them certain things.
“He’s a big part of Gundagai’s Club where it makes them go from 18s, 16s. If you are playing Reserve Grade in Gundagai and getting coached by Marky it’s not such a bad thing as he will teach you a lot on how to propel you into the next phase of your First Grade career.
“I can’t speak any more highly of Marky.
“I used to play centre or lock and Marky was always five-eight or hooker, so we are a bit slower and a bit uglier than when we first started off!”.
“I have loved every second of playing with Marky.
“Playing alongside him from juniors to seniors through all the years, you could say Marky was always a good player. How hard he trained and dedicated himself to the game made him an even better player. Everything he gets, he deserves.
Elphick was not a well man at the end of the season and had to push his body to places it didn’t really want to go. On Grand Final day he was terribly ill and dehydrated and just had to tough it out and grind it out, something he has become accustomed to over his career. “I was crook before the grand final and then the parties and celebrations that followed didn’t assist my health!
“The few weeks away has done me a bit of good.”
His fellow reserve grade players and the club are no doubt keen to know his intentions for 2025 and they can rest easy, he will be back, but in a different role.
“I’ve definitely said I will play next year, but I’d be inclined to take a step back a bit and have a bit of an easier year as I’ve been so invested and involved for too many years. It will be good to step back and relax and enjoy and just have to worry about playing.
“It would be good to just have to worry about myself and look after myself.
“I know plenty of times last year you don’t have time to put into yourself because you spend so much time chasing around other people and looking after other people that you don’t look after your own body.”
Elphick leads by example and said, “There were times last season where you probably shouldn’t have been training but because you are the captain and the coach you have to train otherwise people look for excuses not to train.
“Hopefully now, especially being a bit older, I can look after myself a bit better and it will allow me to be a bit fresher.
“By the end of last year myself and Rhys Smart (34) were talking to each other a fair bit those last few weeks and we were both saying how wrecked our bodies were because we weren’t the oldest, but we were the two oldest forwards by a mile and we were both proper struggling.
“We both kept talking to each other to keep pushing through and keep hoping the young blokes followed as we knew if we quit, they might quit.
“Rhys missed a lot of footy when he was young. He had a bad run with injuries and has played a lot of footy later. He had a bad run with knees and shoulders.
“Rhys was really good this year, especially just rallying around the young blokes trying to keep them going.”
Elphick sites the quality coaching staff brought in to the club over the years by forward thinking committees.
“I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a lot of good coaches over the time I have been there. Even when I was a young fella, there were blokes like Chubby Herring (Anthony), Peter McDonald, Peter Magnone, the Roses and then you had the later era of James Smart, Cameron Woo, Adam Perry. There’s been some really good coaches come through there.
“There was one thing that I was grateful for that I learnt young is what was required to be a week to week First Grader. A lot of young fellas get caught up in thinking that they’ve played one game of First Grade that they are a First Grader now, but the toll that it takes on your body to continuously be good, week in and week out as a young fella, is really hard, and that really got pushed on to me when I was young to drive to better yourself week in week out.
“You don’t just come out of 18s and you are automatically a First Grader, you have to make a lot of sacrifices.
“It’s way harder now. When I first started playing First Grade barely any of the blokes went to the gym and all that sort of stuff, but being small was kind of easy because eventually the big ‘fat blokes’ would knock up and you would come into your own at the end of the half.
“Then the game became a lot more professional and everyone started going to the gym and everyone started training harder and if you didn’t go to the gym and do those little extras you couldn’t play every week because you would get found out because you were unfit or you were slow or you were weak and then you would be back to Reserve Grade the next week and then you had to train harder to get back to First Grade.
“It’s a lot more professional now. Everyone’s a lot bigger, faster, stronger. In Reserve Grade you can kind of just rock up and play, where First Grade there is a lot more to it than that.
“There’s the odd person that can do it but they are usually gifted athletes.
“That’s one thing I was grateful for is what was instilled into me young what you had to do to be a consistent First Grader.
“Then it’s one of those things, once you get it, you kind of do it easy.
“There’s a lot of people that float between First Grade and Reserve Grade and never really work out why they can’t become a First Grader.
“When I first started playing we had lost so many grand finals. We were a good Club but couldn’t get that grand final win or that success at the end of the year and we had a few lower years and I’ve been lucky to be part of the Golden Eras.
“From 2009 until now has been such a good run for a small town. We have made so many grand finals in that time and won a fair percentage of them. A lot of people go their whole career and don’t win a grand final.
Elphick’s passion for the game has translated in to Premierships.
“I’ve got six I think now. There’s plenty of people that would give their left &%# to be able to win one!
Having been around the game for such a long time, Elphick has the knowledge and the right to comment on where the game is going in the bush and in Group 9.
“It’s going to be an interesting time at the moment with the struggle with the juniors.
“We need to bounce back a bit. We have a young First Grade and Reserve Grade team but there’s a little bit of a gap now because we had no 16s and 18s. Hopefully we can bounce back. It’s a bit disappointing that the 16s aren’t going to play because last year Gundagai had a really strong 15s team and we’ve been hoping that that 15s will be 16s this year and build those young fellas through to be the next generation, but now they are holding them back to another year of minor league and that stalls our progression a little bit as well.
“I’m not a fan of the change, especially for clubs like us that didn’t have a 16s or 18s this year, it makes it hard.”
He holds fears for the women’s tackle competition to work in 2025 and this is mainly down to where clubs will be able to draw players from, including Gundagai. They can’t be plucked out of thin air, however, he also knows that it is a full contact sport and there will be ladies with basically zero experience potentially turning out again other women who may have five years of Rugby behind them.
It appears the NRL and NSW Rugby League are playing catch up to Aussie Rules and Rugby when it comes to women’s participation. It’s taken the code 85 or 90 years to realise that the ‘better’ gender is a fertile breeding ground for participation and revenue. But what will this mean in the next 12 months, five years and decade? And what sort of injury toll will this have on them?
“I’m not against the girls at all, but bringing in two or three teams in one year is too much. They are putting the cart way before the horse there. They should have brought in one team per year and slowly built their way into it.
“I watched a few girls minor league tackle games this year and the amount of injuries in it was insane just not knowing how to get their bodies in the right position to tackle or fall.
“There’s going to be a lot of girls that have never played footy before playing against girls who have a tackle union background who are going to get injured.
“I know myself that every now and again you’ll get a bloke turn up to Reserve Grade that has never played footy before and you cringe every time thinking that this bloke’s going to get hurt because he has no idea of the contact, how to brace himself, and it makes you nervous for the first six months until they get the hang of it, and there’s going to be plenty of girls in that situation.
“Getting a broken neck is my biggest fear for this whole push of the girls tackle.
“I’m all for them starting it in minor league now and letting them progress through and maybe having an opens team now so the older ones can play, but to chuck in an 18s team of girls, they haven’t even played footy before, it’s crazy.
“We could all be proved wrong, but I will be very surprised if we are!”.
When Father Time does call time on Mark’s career, and it won’t be for a while yet, it appears his no nonsense, common sense approach could make him a good administrator. Sometimes the administrators who haven’t played the game for a while or have been fare removed lose touch with what is happening on the field. The decision makers in Sydney would do well to get to ANZAC Park and watch the Tumut Blues take on Gundagai and see what real bush footy is about. While they are there they could talk to Mark and the Gundagai fraternity about their thoughts. When the bush has done so much to prop up the NRL and provided such a futile breeding ground of talent for so many years why not ask the opinion of a Life Member of the Gundagai Tigers in Mark Elphick.
Life Membership is rarely given out to current players highlighting how highly Mark is thought of not only as a footballer but as a footballing mind. Congratulations Mark, you have earned it. Mark Elphick, Gundagai Tiger Life Member!