For the last eight seasons, Bathurst City have been a dominant force in the women’s league and they look set to be joined by a mens side in the coming year as the deadline for team nominations approaches.

Unlike the women’s Bathurst City squad, the men’s equivalent isn’t set to be based around two Bathurst clubs (Kelso and Waratahs). 

At this point it looks likely to be a group dominated by youth as coach Kevin Sherman looks to give talented up-and-comers an opportunity that they might not otherwise get.

“For the moment things are looking pretty good for a team, we’ve had a couple of training sessions and got reasonable numbers,” he said.

“It looks like it will be a very young side, we’re looking at hopefully getting a core group of about 16 to 18 players in order to enter the side.”

There is some cause for scepticism among the bigger clubs given just how dominant the likes of St Pat’s and Lithgow Panthers, and to a lesser extent Souths and Parkes have been in recent seasons.

But with Dubbo in their first season back and Lithgow Zig Zag having battled to keep up with the better teams, Sherman said that he is confident his side can, with some experience under their belt, compete.

“Initially I would expect us to struggle even against the weaker teams, no doubt about that,” he said.

“I think with the players we will have we will get more competitive as the year goes on though as those young players learn more and more about that level of hockey.

“We’re not relying on one or two clubs locally for our players, we’ll welcome them from anywhere and already we have a couple from Lithgow and another from Orange.

“What would be nice is to get a couple of older players who might not necessarily have played Premier League recently, but who do have that experience in the past.

“We’ve still got a couple of weeks yet and I’m pretty confident we’ll have everything sorted out by then.”