Rural clubs key to Powell's plan

After growing up on the family farm at Darke Peak, and later years at Kimba following her dad's work, in about 2000 Sarah moved to the Kimberley region to work for a business in finance at Kununurra, WA, after completing a degree at the University of Adelaide.

In a couple of years, she and her partner at the time decided to move to Cairns, Qld, where they bought a home and stayed for about 12 years.

In that time, Sarah went back to university and studied accounting externally through UniSA and worked at a public accounting firm, as well as a peak economic agency in Cairns, before being headhunted for an executive role with Regional Development Australia overseeing the Far North Qld and Torres Strait Island regions.

But her quick rise to the top had its side effects. After a couple of years, she became ill and burnt out.

"I decided to take some time off and to get away and have a bit of R&R and focus on myself for awhile," she said.

"I thought I'd take a trip back to SA, to the last place I remembered being really happy, and that was at the family shack in Port Neill as a child."

Sarah had planned on spending a month there, but fate intervened when she had a car accident more than a week after she arrived.

She was stuck for several months while her car was repaired and in that time, fell in love with a local farmer - and never left.

Sarah and her partner Caleb Prime now live on his family farm in Wharminda.

Through her involvement with the Wharminda and Port Neill communities, Sarah joined the Ports Football and Netball Club and was encouraged to assist the executive committee with her skills and experience.

It was in understanding the position the Eastern Eyre league was in, and the fact it had contracted to the size of 14 clubs, that Sarah started thinking about the far-reaching consequences if the league was disbanded and re-formed with other areas, or dissolved completely.

"It's not so much the impact on the country sport that's going to be the greatest deficit for the community, it's what's actually going to happen to those towns that rely on that sporting club as that hub of community participation and people learning how to become role models and really just staying engaged with the community," she said.

Sarah started to form an idea around what could be done to reinvest in values systems to keep the club strong.

"The farming district that Ports is surrounded by is full of really resilient people that have had to battle it out and do it tough, like many farming communities around Australia," she said.

"So they already had that resilience, but we just needed to keep reinvesting in it coming up through the next generation and trying to develop young leaders who would be willing to continue that values system and carry it forward and keep standing up for the region.

"After I put a lot of thought into that idea, I was able to scope out what is now the Champions Academy project."

Champions Academy is a mentoring program designed to increase participation at ground level using sports clubs and coaching clinics as the delivery platform.

"Those clinics themselves are planned and delivered by a group we call the ambassadors, which is teenaged and young adults, say 15-25 years of age," Sarah said.

"They're being mentored by an older club member. That person becomes their go-to person throughout the year to support them, answer questions, encourage them and just be alongside them as they're learning this experience."