Bridgenorth Football Club didn’t come from comfort or certainty. It came from people who wanted a club in their town badly enough to build it, back it, and keep it alive through every era that followed. From early days on a rough paddock to the Parrot Park we know today, the story of this club has always been about more than football. It’s about a community that shows up, gets the work done, and takes pride in what it represents.
Across 100 years, Bridgenorth has been shaped by premiership teams, tough seasons, rivalries, volunteers, families, and leaders who refused to let the club drift. Every decade has left its mark, not just through results, but through standards and culture passed from one generation to the next.
Try naming a town without a football club.
Easy.
Now try naming a town that once had a football club and doesn’t anymore. There are far too many.
Bridgenorth is different. We don’t sit in a built-up township with a big industry base behind us. We never have. Parrot Park sits where it sits, a football ground in the middle of nowhere, supported by people who chose to make it work anyway.
That’s why this club is as grassroots as Tasmania gets. And why the story matters. Bridgenorth isn’t defined by being the biggest or loudest club. We’re defined by surviving when we weren’t expected to, and thriving when everything said we shouldn’t.
STORIES FROM THE PARROTS WHO SET THE STANDARD OVER 100 YEARS.
To mark our centenary, the club produced a 12-episode documentary series called Defying the Odds. It focuses on the people who shaped Bridgenorth, the great footballers, long-serving volunteers, family figures, and leaders who built the club into what it is.
The series doesn’t try to polish the past. It tells it straight, the hard years, the good years, the moments that mattered, and the people who made sure Bridgenorth kept moving forward. Each episode has a matching article on this page so the stories live here beyond the screen.
Legacy here isn’t about talk. It’s about what gets carried forward. You see it in families who’ve been part of the club for decades. In players who return to coach or help out. In past players who still care about how the place runs. In the volunteers who did the jobs that keep a club alive, building facilities, running the gate, feeding teams, washing jumpers, organising match day, raising money, keeping the doors open. That work built Bridgenorth as much as any premiership.
The standard has always been clear: respect the jumper, look after people, and represent the club properly. That’s what’s been passed down, year after year.
Football was being played in the Bridgenorth district as early as 1919, originally as a way to reunite former comrades from the Claremont Training Camp after World War I. But the club itself was formally organised in 1925, led by the Scolyer family, who became the founding force behind Bridgenorth’s first senior sides.
The early years were tough. Bridgenorth was seen as too remote, too inexperienced, and too unlikely to last. There were even locals who believed the district couldn’t sustain a club at all. The Parrots answered those doubts the only way they could: by doing the work. Players trained in paddocks and farmyards, pulled ferns from the ground at the start of every season, and travelled to games in two Model T lorries. In 1929, just five seasons after formation, and after two runner-up finishes, Bridgenorth won its first premiership. That resilience is where “defying the odds” starts.
After finishing runner-up again in 1934, Bridgenorth went into recess for 1935. But after World War II, with a second generation of Parrots coming through, the club returned to competition in 1946, and launched one of the strongest eras in its history.
Between 1946 and 1967, Bridgenorth played in 15 of 22 grand finals and won nine flags, including a post-war West Tamar Association record of four premierships in a row (1949–1952). In 1955, the club moved to the ground we play on today. By 1967, Bridgenorth had claimed its tenth WTFA senior premiership and cemented itself as a club that didn’t just survive, it could dominate.
As leagues changed, Bridgenorth adapted. The Tamar Football Association era brought heartbreak in 1982 (a one-point loss to George Town) and then redemption with back-to-back senior flags in 1983 and 1984. The NTFA era brought another defining success in 1996, winning the first senior premiership under the revived competition banner.
In recent times, Bridgenorth last won a senior men’s flag in 2010, appearing in 15 of 30 men’s grand finals between 2010 and 2019, while the reserves built their own era with five straight flags from 2010 to 2014.
A new chapter began in 2019 with the introduction of a Senior Women’s team, finals in year one, and now a premier program. That same year, Parrot Park found itself in national headlines in one of the stranger football stories you’ll ever hear. But that’s Bridgenorth: unique, unpredictable, and always worth talking about.
Bridgenorth has never been about being the loudest club around. We’ve been about being solid. Being connected. Being a place people trust and want to be part of. That culture didn’t happen by accident. It comes from the standards set by those who came before us, and it’s protected by the people here now.
Every team running out today is part of a longer line. The people who built this club didn’t do it for recognition; they did it so Bridgenorth would still be here, still strong, still worth playing for. That’s the standard we inherit.
We take the lessons learnt seriously: clubs last when people show up, when standards stay clear, and when the jumper matters more than any individual. That’s what has kept Bridgenorth going for a century, and that’s what will keep it going for the next one.
