Sports clubs across Australia unite to pitch in during coronavirus crisis | Scott Heinrich

Sport has always been more than a game to Craig Foster. Digest any of his musings on football, and Foster’s view of sport as a vehicle to effect change, break down boundaries and bring people together is palpable.

The former Socceroo and SBS presenter is also a dab hand at making things happen. Foster was the driving force behind the release last year of Hakeem al-Araibi, the Bahraini footballer detained in Thailand, and has recently campaigned on behalf of asylum seekers stranded on Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Now, Covid-19 is in his crosshairs. As politicians grapple with the social and economic carnage caused by the global health crisis, Foster is calling on sport in Australia, now that there is no sport, to unite and pitch in during this extraordinary time of need.

“Sport is closed down across the country. That is a trauma for many people in itself. But broader society is hurting, we’re all hurting together,” Foster tells Guardian Australia. “One of the best ways for sport to recover from all this is to connect to each other and to the broader Australian community. Sporting clubs are important social connectors.”

Foster is calling on the multitudes connected with community sport in Australia to redeploy their volunteering efforts and play not for points this season, but for lives. It’s a grand concept. And if it sounds like a movement, that’s because it is: the #PlayForLives movement.

“Now that sport is being closed own, we have participants who were training and competing for four to five hours per week,” Foster says. “We’re asking all of sport to step up and apply that to not only their own community but to the rest of Australia. What’s occurred at community level is that many of the social service delivery agencies, who are making meals, delivering hot meals, driving people around, their funding has dried up and many of them have had to close the doors. The load on those that are still existing has expanded exponentially.

“We want to put sport at the service of the Australian community. Sport has a number of values which are really important: teamwork, solidarity and endurance. The need for volunteering in the last couple of weeks has become more acute than ever. We’re asking all participants who were going to play to put themselves forward to volunteer in some way.”

Such a call to arms might seem precarious at a time when human movement is governed by social distancing and lockdowns. But Foster envisages a broad spectrum of assistance.

“There are millions of ways we can help. If we create a sporting coalition for humanity, a sporting volunteer workforce, people can add their own professional skills. People are working from home now. The time they would’ve been training and playing they can now use to apply their professional skills as a designer, a lawyer, an IT expert.

“Safety is the absolute priority for everyone right now. Nevertheless, the need for people to physically go and help pack boxes, to drive cancer patients to hospital, to drive trucks, to deliver food to refugees and vulnerable families is chronic.

“For some it will be volunteering in community and taking every precaution under government guidelines, for others it might be from home in a digital sense. That’s a matter for the non-government organisations. Red Cross will be interested in delivering digital messaging campaigns, whereas Foodbank and Meals On Wheels will need us packing boxes to get to families that night. There’s a triad of sport, government and NGOs that need to work together right now.”

What started out as a good idea that Foster floated to his Waverley Old Boys Over 35s teammates has taken off, with a variety of sporting bodies and public figures pledging their commitment to #PlayForLives.

“Football has responded beautifully. There is a tremendous amount of desire within the game to step forward. I’m expecting that FFA [Football Federation Australia] will be getting involved in the near term. But this need is far too great. One sport can’t cover it,” he says. To that end Foster has succeeded in getting the NSWRL on board, with Brad Fittler and Ben Elias to serve in ambassadorial roles. Foster says discussions with Rugby Australia and the AFL are progressing well, while Liz Ellis has picked up the ball on behalf of the netball community.

“We need both levels of sport involved. We need national level for scale and we need grassroots community for connectedness, for relationships, for personal support. A top-down approach is great because we can scale really quickly and get a lot of information to a lot of people. Equally, the grassroots clubs need to take ownership of this because they’re the ones who will be in the community.”

Many people Foster is asking for help will be experiencing their own struggles as the coronavirus outbreak bites industry and forces chunks of the workforce onto reduced hours or out of work altogether.

“We’ve got historic levels of job losses, people on the bread line who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Sport is experiencing its own financial trauma. But equally we are a strong community that understands resilience. What sport teaches us is that there are horrible times, but they always end. In sport, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.

“In sport we are used to facing a challenge, to supporting each other arm in arm, and that’s why sport has a critical role to play in not only supporting Australia right now, but also in our recovery and repair.”