Dave Hotham re-elected as Bathurst Panthers president

Hotham first took on the role for the 2021 Group 10 season, but as the COVID-19 lockdown saw play abandoned before a finals series could be contested, he felt he had some unfinished business.

So when Panthers held their annual general meeting last weekend, Hotham nominated to return as president and was voted in once more.

"We finished last season on a note where it wasn't that good with COVID, so I thought I'd take it on for another year at least," he said.

One of Hotham's first items of business was overseeing a merger of Panthers' senior and junior clubs.

The president feels strengthening those bonds will be vital as Panthers build towards the future. The club has already seen the benefits of fostering junior talents and it is something Hotham wants to continue.

"They [junior club] wanted to do it and we wanted to do, so we'll be joined together and have our meetings together. We'll still be our different identities, but we want to work together a little bit more," Hotham explained.

"We need to keep developing our juniors. It's a classic example with our club, last season out of our top 18, 15 of them were local juniors. We are very happy with that, but we want to keep that going, we don't want to go away from that.

"We had an era there when I first came along where we known as a club that wanted to buy players from everywhere, we had that bad image.

"But we've been working at it, chipping away at it, and it's good that blokes like Jack Siejka and Dougie Hewitt and Blake Seager and Brent Seager - he's been our rock for years - have played for us."

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As Hotham pointed out, players like captain-coach Hewitt, the Seager brothers, the Betts brothers and Nick Loader have all come through the Panthers' junior program and gone on to be crucial in the club's Group 10 premier league success.

But in season 2021 the president enjoyed seeing more emerging talents follow in their footsteps.

"We are very happy with the way things are going, last season while we've got the Seagers and all those bigger name players, I got more enjoyment out of seeing three or four of the young blokes out of reserve grade get a run in first grade," Hotham said.

"They handled that quite well and I get more pleasure out of that than having blokes come back from Sydney to play. That's what we've got to do, we've got to nurture these young blokes.

"For instance young Dylan Miles, he played fullback for reserve grade and he carved up. I asked my son where he came from and he said that he'd always been here, he just didn't think he was good enough to play so he didn't come back to play.

"Young Storm Siejka, he had been on the verge of playing first grade and last season he just jumped up another leg, played well and then unfortunately broke his leg. But he was going great."

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