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First Aid for Footy Season: What Every Club Needs on the Sideline
A player goes down in the back pocket, the runner is already halfway across the ground, and the one person who knows where the kit is parked their car at the other end of the car park. That is the moment a sideline first aid kit either works or it doesn't.
Winter footy puts plenty of players on cold, hard, wet grounds every weekend. The injuries are the same knocks, corks, rolled ankles and split eyebrows, plus the occasional one that needs an ambulance. What separates a club that handles it well from one that panics is not a bigger kit. It is knowing the first sixty seconds, and having a sports first aid kit in Australia that is stocked and reachable.
What a sideline first aid kit needs that a clubroom kit doesn't
A clubroom kit sits on a wall and gets opened twice a season. A sideline kit goes out every match, in the rain, and gets raided by four teams across a Saturday. Treating them as the same thing is how clubs end up with an empty box at three-quarter time.
The sideline kit has to travel and survive weather. It needs a hard case or sealed bag, not a cardboard box that turns to mush on a wet bench, cold packs you can grab fast for the routine corks and joint knocks, plus strapping tape and gloves in quantity and enough adhesive dressings that you don't run out by lunchtime.
When sideline kits come back to us for a check, the damage is rarely the contents running out, it is the packaging. A dressing packet that has sat damp in a bag all winter loses its sterile barrier, even when the dressing looks fine and the date is good, so we pull it.
For the full contents list, we cover building a sports club first aid kit properly in a separate guide. This piece is about the part most clubs skip: what you do when the kit is needed.
The match-day response: who does what in the first minute
Most sideline confusion is a roles problem, not a kit problem. Nobody decided in advance who runs on, who calls Triple Zero, and who keeps the rest of the players back.
Sort it before the first bounce. One person is the first aider for the day and carries the kit. A second has a charged phone and the ground address saved, because reading out a street address while you are stressed is harder than it sounds. Everyone else keeps clear.
When someone goes down and stays down, run the same first sixty seconds:
- Check whether they are responsive and breathing normally.
- Look for serious signs: a head, neck or spinal knock, loss of consciousness, a visible fracture, heavy bleeding, or anything that does not look right.
- If any of those are there, call Triple Zero (000) first, then treat while you wait. Paramedics will assess and transport.
Everything below that line is what the sideline kit is built for: pressure on a bleed, a cold pack on a joint, a dressing on a graze.
Head knocks are the one you don't gamble on
A cork heals. A poorly managed head knock can end a season or worse. This is the one area where a club should never wave a player back on to keep numbers up.
If a player takes a knock to the head and shows any concussion signs, confusion, unsteadiness, a blank look, a headache, or just seems off, they come off and they stay off. The Australian Institute of Sport's concussion guidelines put it plainly: if in doubt, sit them out. There is no same-day return after a suspected concussion, whatever the scoreboard says.
The return to play after that is a medical decision, not a sideline one. A player works back up through a staged, graded return only after a doctor has cleared them, following the current return-to-play guidance in the Australian Concussion Guidelines for Youth and Community Sport. The club's job is not to memorise a timeline, it is to keep the player out until they are assessed and cleared. Tell the parents or the player, write down what you saw, and point them to a doctor.
Keep it stocked across the whole season
The single most common finding when a kit comes back for a check is empty packets. Adhesive strips, antiseptic wipes and cold packs disappear first, used for everything from real injuries to splinters and grazed knuckles. By round eight, the kit looks full and is actually hollow.
Build a restock habit into the season, not the off-season. Check the kit after every second match and top up the fast-movers. Strapping tape gets through faster than clubs expect, so keep spare Straptor strapping tape in the shed rather than running to the chemist on game day. If you would rather start from a properly built base kit, our sports first aid kits are assembled and checked here in Bendigo before they ship.
There is no single national rulebook setting AFL club first aid requirements down to the item, so most clubs work to their league or association's ground-safety conditions and to what the grade of football throws up. A senior contact side and an Auskick morning need different kits. If your club runs through a school or shares its ground, the same readiness thinking applies off the field, which we cover in first aid compliance for Australian schools.
For the cold-weather injury pattern, see first aid essentials for winter sports clubs. The first aid in the Australian outdoors hub covers staying ready away from home, and the schools and community first aid hub does the same for school and community groups.
If you want a hand matching a kit to your grade and player numbers, call us on 03 5443 2239 or email info@firstaiddistributions.com.au. A real person who knows the products picks up.