Liam Jurrah’s personal situation, the passing of Jim Stynes and the false accusations directed at coach Mark Neeld have dominated the football news in the past month.
And, on Thursday, the club terminated its sponsorship agreement with EnergyWatch, after its CEO Ben Polis made some extraordinary comments on social media website Facebook.
Schwab conceded that the game threw up unpredictable items, but even for the administrator who has been in the game for 30 years, the start of the season was hard to fathom.
“If someone had actually tried to create this storyline at the start of the year, you would never have believed it,” he said.
“But at the same time, you build strength in your organisation through facing these types of challenges together.
“Our club is a great club, and it’s been a great club for a long time. It’s going through a growth phase, which has been changed right across the organisation.
“It’s times like this where you can bring your club together and be strong at times when we feel proud about our club.”
Schwab said the loss of the sponsorship was a price to pay for integrity.
“If your club is prepared to deal with these issues with integrity, you’re amazed at what it then shakes out in terms of opportunities, and that’s already starting to evolve today,” he said.
“If our club had chosen not to go down this track, we would’ve been compromising everything that we’ve historically stood for, and we would’ve compromised everything that we stand for at this time, and everything that we seek to stand for.
“The last few weeks have been testing at a whole lot of levels for our club, and the great thing about our organisation is that during this period we’ve been able to share the responsibility and leadership as we’ve faced these issues.”
Schwab said he was surprised by Polis’ comments, but acknowledged that the club had been concerned with his comments over a period of time.
“It’s fair to say we didn’t check the private Facebook page of this CEO, in terms of our study as we were doing at that time, but clearly we became increasingly concerned with their conduct,” he said.
EnergyWatch has had its name attached to many Melbourne properties, and the club is now working as practicably as possible to have its former sponsor’s name removed from these items.
