They convincingly – and in great style – won their first match at the Arafura Games in the team’s first crack on the international sporting arena.

The young players are a real credit to their community—and their school.

In fact it was the Borroloola School that kicked off the Cyclones back in 1996, and it’s gone from strength to strength ever since.

It’s all down to the school’s Glenn Thompson.

In the years since he started the soccer program, the Cyclones’ reputation as the Gulf’s most famous sporting side has grown from that small corner of the Territory to the national level.

So thanks, Glenn, your blood’s worth bottling!

And of course this is in the lead up to the official “switch on” of the lights at the Purkiss Reserve and the coming footy carnival.

At last we’ll have a facility that can be used in the cool of the evening.

The challenge now lies in front of all of us here in Tennant, as well as the out of town mob, to maximise the sporting, social, health and youth benefits we can get from this great facility.

It will be really interesting to see which sporting codes and activities take up the challenge of using the Reserve to its utmost.

But there’s also a “chicken and egg” challenge that we face as well.

The new lights will be user pays—with the electricity costs to be operated on a card system, paid for by each group that uses the Reserve at nights.

The real art will be to attract corporate sponsorship to help out with these costs before the events start, and before the benefits such as reduced youth crime and anti-social behaviour become apparent.

We know positive youth programs through things like sport can have terrific results in such a close knit community as Tennant Creek.

So which will come first?

The sponsorship for the events, or the events themselves?

That’s the real question, and it would be good to see both community and sporting groups, along with potential sponsors, knuckling down to answer it as soon as we can. Tennant Creek has a long tradition of self reliance, and if anyone can get the chickens and eggs to turn up at the same time—we can!