For his service to Seaforth Football Club and the MWFA competitions, Steve Harding has been given the MWFA Meritorious Service Award.
Steve Harding and his family have been with Seaforth for 23 years, starting in 2001. In the early years all four of his daughters played for Seaforth, making for busy weekends.
Then in 2011, Steve wanted to be more involved and began coaching his youngest daughter’s team – he would coach girls’ teams every year for 12 consecutive years. Four of the players from those teams are in the current Seaforth Women’s Premier League squad, which is the most successful team in the history of the club. With his passion for coaching and development of players, Steve can rightly claim to have played a part in laying the foundation for the WPL team’s success.
Steve joined the club’s committee in 2015, serving as Seaforth’s Women’s Youth Age Coordinator and Women’s Grading Coordinator for four years until 2018. At the end of 2018, our long serving club president Richard Wright retired and that role remained vacant during 2019. However, that year Steve stepped up and took on an astonishing workload, performing six different committee roles. This included management of all gear and grounds, running the Women’s Grading and a massive involvement in four other roles.
During this period, Steve somehow found time to coach Seaforth’s W16 Division 1 team. His influence was also felt away from the football field – he introduced barista coffee to the canteen (hooray!), as well as implementing a digitised system for stock and credit card payments in the bar / canteen.
By the end of 2019 it was obvious that Steve’s football experience, friendly way of dealing with people and corporate skillset made him the perfect candidate to be Seaforth’s next club president. Fortunately for Seaforth, he offered to take on the role and was elected in 2020.
2020 was a short season due to COVID restrictions, but Steve continued his drive to modenise the club by implementing new services and processes. In 2021, 2022 and 2023, he took on several unfilled committee roles to make sure the club ran smoothly. Despite having retired from coaching at the end of 2021, in 2022 Steve coached Seaforth’s W14 team for the season, even though he had no other connection to the team.
In 2022 and 2023, Steve championed both the upscaling of Seaforth’s development programs and the push to re-energise the club’s Men’s U18, U21 and AL1 playing groups. As always, he was also a quiet driving force behind the Women’s Premier League side, providing whatever support they needed. In addition to all of this, Steve guided and contributed to canteen improvements, making the Seaforth canteen, which is such an integral part of club culture, one of the best performing and most enjoyed in the association.
There’s a positive vibe around the club amongst all age groups and Seaforth are well placed for future success. Much of that has come from Steve’s enormous contribution and tireless efforts during the last five years.
Seaforth FC know that they are extremely fortunate to have such a great “hands-on” club man leading operations and they are thrilled to see him being recognised by the association for all of his efforts over the last 13 years.
