Membership of a NSW registered club is more than a commercial relationship between a business and its customers. Members constitute the club and, depending upon their class of membership, have important governance rights.
Those rights include voting on constitutional changes and electing the directors who govern the organisation.
Before amalgamating with other clubs, Panthers membership was very simple. Members paid $20 annually, pensioners paid $10 for membership.1 Penrith had approximately 60,000 ordinary members. All members were eligible to participate in the governance of Panthers through voting in Board election, voting on constitutional matters and attendance at general meetings.
Amalgamations brought with it a challenge around the pricing of membership — the membership fees for all the amalgamating clubs was less than half the fee charge at the Penrith club.
To accommodate the price differential, a new category of membership was created — Social Membership. This allowed members from amalgamating clubs to retain their membership at a low rate. Taking Social Membership meant forgoing their rights to participate in the governance of the wider Panthers group.
As the number of amalgamations grew, so did the number of members — 120,000 members in total.
The membership offer was still relatively simple — Ordinary Membership $20; Social Membership $2.
However, Panthers was running the risk of breaching the Registered Clubs Act, which required a majority of the club’s members to be entitled to vote in Board elections and on changes to the constitution.
With Social Memberships proving popular at regional clubs and also with members who held membership in both Penrith and one or more of the other clubs in the group, there was a high potential for Social Members to become the majority.
This was still not regarded as a difficult problem.
A simple price reduction in Ordinary Membership would be the solution.
The recommendation of a lower-fee ($8 +GST) ordinary membership was being urged by every one of the fourteen club venues, the Panthers marketing team and all the management team.
This should have been a relatively straightforward commercial decision.
It turned out not to be so simple.
This recommendation was delivered to the Board who repeatedly rejected it and responded with requests for more information, more research — even asking for an analysis of the price elasticity of membership.
Recommendations to the Board set out the reasoning behind them. Although a potential 60 per cent reduction in membership revenue was an obvious concern, management believed there were strong commercial arguments supporting the change.
After months of rejection, it became clear that the recommendation was going nowhere. It also raised the possibility that the real obstacle was no longer the price of membership at all.
Roger Cowan took an extraordinary step as a final resort.
He went into a Board meeting with a three-page media release already prepared, ready to publicly accuse five directors of putting their own positions ahead of the interests of Panthers members.
As described in Part 51 of The Series, the release was never distributed. The Board eventually agreed to the lower fee.
But the document survives — and it helps explain why something as apparently simple as the price of membership had become so difficult.
The document reveals that what began as a relatively simple commercial and marketing issue had become entangled in arguments about voting rights and the future control of Panthers.
The three-page media release was headed.
“Directors put themselves ahead of members” — Cowan
It was dated 27 July 2002 and had been prepared for public distribution if the Board again rejected management’s recommendation.
According to the release, the Board had rejected the $8.80 proposal at its meeting the previous Tuesday.
Cowan said the reason was that the cheaper membership would be available to members across the Panthers Group and would give those members the right to vote at a meeting scheduled for 15 September to consider a constitutional change.
That constitutional change was itself significant.
At the time, Penrith members were guaranteed at least five positions on the nine-member Panthers Board. The proposed change would create a 14-member Group Board, with nine positions elected by Penrith members.
Cowan alleged that some directors wanted to prevent members from the other Panthers clubs from voting or attending the September meeting.
He also said some members of the Board had argued that increasing the number of voting members at the amalgamated clubs could result in Penrith losing control of the Group.
Cowan’s response was blunt. Penrith already had guaranteed majority representation on the existing nine-member Board and, under the proposed structure, Penrith members would elect nine of fourteen directors. If that was insufficient to protect Penrith’s position, he argued, he did not know what would be.
He also claimed that treating long-term members of Port Macquarie Panthers and ClubNova as Social rather than Ordinary Members would deny some 25,000 people the voting rights they had been promised.
These were Cowan’s allegations in a media release prepared during an increasingly bitter Board dispute. They do not, by themselves, establish the motives of the directors he was criticising.
While the Board agree to the new $8 membership — $8.80 including GST — being offered from August 2002. It was still far from simple because this membership price was introduced as an extra option rather than simply changing the price of ordinary membership.
Panthers now had a membership with 3 tiers with prices including GST:
Ordinary Membership: $22
The New Membership: $8.80
Social Membership: $2.20 (Note: this is also referred to as Remote Site Membership – it not available to those whose home club was Penrith)
Ordinary members paying $22 could vote for the Group Board and, subject to constitutional requirements, stand for election to it.
Members paying the new $8.80 fee could attend general and annual general meetings and vote on most resolutions. Their right to vote for the Group Board was initially shown as conditional upon the passage of a special resolution at the general meeting scheduled for 15 September 2002. They could not stand for election to the Group Board
Social members paying $2.20 could attend general and annual general meetings, but could not vote for or stand for election to the Group Board.
All three categories could stand for election to the Advisory Board of their selected home club.
The membership structure was therefore attempting to accommodate different kinds of members within an organisation that had changed enormously in only a few years.
When this was placed into communications for members it confused more than clarified. The following table is an extract the Panthers website circa Sptember 2002:
Click to enlarge
The September Change
The next step came on 15 September 2002, when a special general meeting approved changes to the Group Board structure.
The existing nine-member Board would increase to fourteen directors. Nine positions would be elected by Penrith members, while five would be guaranteed to nominees from other clubs within the Panthers Group.
A Panthers website announcement published the following day also confirmed that all members except Social Members would have the right to vote.
Media Release — 16 Sep 2002. Click to enlarge
What had begun as an argument about the price of membership had therefore become part of a much wider restructuring of membership rights and representation within the growing Panthers Group.
More Than a Price Cut
The dispute described in Part 51 began with what management regarded as a straightforward commercial problem. Penrith’s membership was expensive compared with other clubs, while amalgamation was creating a rapidly growing number of cheaper Social Members.
But solving one problem created another.
Membership price became connected to voting eligibility; voting eligibility became connected to Board representation; and Board representation became caught up in the increasingly bitter argument about who would control the expanding Panthers Group.
The $8.80 membership was therefore more than a price cut. It was part of the much larger challenge of adapting the governance of Panthers to an organisation that had grown far beyond Penrith.
That was why something apparently so simple became so difficult.
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There was also the innovative Permanent Membership which in this era was $475. With this membership – an ordinary membership carrying full voting rights – there was no annual renewal and the fee was refundable in full if the member resigned, or payable to their estate on their death. Many who held this “perpetual” membership mistakenly referred to themselves as “life” members. Life Membership is an honour awarded to those who have served the club with distinction. ↩︎
Today, the mental side of elite sport is taken for granted. Professional teams employ sports psychologists and mental skills coaches. Visualisation, relaxation techniques, controlled breathing and the management of anxiety and confidence have become familiar parts of preparing athletes to perform under pressure.
It was rather different in 1978.
More than four decades later, Phil Gould recalled one of his earliest encounters with those ideas — at Penrith, through Roger Cowan.
Gould told the story during an episode of Six Tackles with Gus in September 2021. The discussion had turned to Parramatta’s use of a mental skills coach during the NRL finals and to the relative importance of the physical and mental sides of elite sport.
For Gould, there was little doubt. At the highest level, he suggested, the mental component accounted for perhaps 95 per cent of performance. Players needed to learn how to control their thinking under pressure, he said, and that was a skill that took time to develop.
Then he remembered Roger.
An Experiment at Penrith
Gould described Cowan as the man who ran the Leagues Club and someone who read widely about self-improvement. Roger had long been particularly interested in hypnosis and in techniques, he believed could help people get the best out of themselves.
In May 1978, he decided to try some of those ideas with the Penrith first-grade team.
Gould’s memory of the occasion, 43 years later, compressed the chronology a little. He recalled the match as only his second game in first grade. In fact, he had debuted for Penrith in 1976.
But the match was a significant first for the young Gould.
It was his first game as captain of the Penrith Panthers.
The previous Sunday, 30 April, club captain Mick Stephenson had played his final match. Mounting injuries had finally brought his career to an end, but he went out with a remarkable performance. Penrith had lost its first five matches of the 1978 season; against North Sydney, Stephenson scored two tries as the Panthers recorded their first win, 17–16.
The following week, the captaincy passed to Gould.
He was just 19.
Penrith’s opponents on Sunday, 7 May were Eastern Suburbs. Gould recalls Bob Fulton being captain-coach of Easts that year but it was Arthur Beetson However, for this game at the Sydney Sports Ground Beetson did not play and Fulton was the captain.
Gould remembers the young Panthers being given virtually no chance.
Roger decided to try something different.
Shoes Off, Lie on the Floor
Before the game, Gould recalls, the Penrith players walked from the Sports Ground to a nearby hotel. Pubs were closed on Sundays in those days, but Roger knew someone who allowed the team inside.
The players removed their shoes and lay on the floor.
Roger began what Gould describes as a relaxation and hypnotherapy session.
He asked the players to relax, control their breathing and then visualise the match ahead. Gould remembers Roger asking them to imagine themselves playing the perfect game — making tackles, kicking well, scoring tries and seeing everything they did producing a positive result.
Gould, reflecting on this in 43 yers later, could see parallels with techniques that had become commonplace in professional sport.
At the time, however, this was something very different.
As the players lay quietly imagining their perfect performances, one of Penrith’s front-rowers1 suddenly cried out:
“Oh No!”
Everyone sat up.
As Gould remembered it, that rather killed the mood.
Then they beat Easts.
Whatever contribution Roger’s experiment made, something went right that afternoon.
Penrith beat Eastern Suburbs 15–13.
Inevitably, Gould recalled, everyone credited the victory to Roger having hypnotised the team.
So they did it again.
Before the following match against St George at Kogarah on Saturday, 13 May, Roger arranged another session. This time, however, there was a practical problem.
At the Sports Ground the previous week, the hotel had been only a short walk away. Roger didn’t know the St George area nearly as well. The venue he found was down towards Blakehurst — much further from the ground than he had appreciated.
The players walked there, went through another session and then had to walk all the way back to Kogarah. They arrived late, rushed their preparation and St George beat them 26–9.
Gould’s conclusion was succinct:
That was the end of the hypnotherapy.
HEAR PHIL GOULD TELL THE STORY
In this 12-minute extract from Six Tackles with Gus (September 2012), Phil Gould recalls Roger Cowan’s experiments with hypnotherapy and visualisation at Penrith in 1978 — and explains the lasting influence the experience had on his own interest in sports psychology.
Excerpt from Six Tackles with Gus courtesy of Nine Network Australia
It would be easy to leave the story there — an entertaining glimpse of a very different era of rugby league.
But Gould didn’t.
Something Stayed With Gus.
Despite the scepticism of some of the players, and despite the somewhat chaotic end to Roger’s experiment, Gould says he personally got something from it.
More importantly, he says:
“It piqued my interest in sports psychology.”
That interest stayed with him.
When Gould eventually moved into coaching, he became, in his words, “a very strong believer” in the psychological side of preparation and incorporated it into his coaching programs. He sought out sports psychologists, learned from them, and developed ways of helping players understand their own thought processes, motivation, preparation and performance.
Gould’s approach was not about a few minutes of emotional motivation before a match. His 2021 explanation is much broader: self-appraisal, goal setting, preparation, communication, trust, relationships between players and understanding how an individual’s role affects those around him.
And he traced the beginning of his interest back to those early experiences at Penrith.
“That Sort of Stuff Was Unheard of Back Then”
There is an interesting echo to Gould’s recollection.
Many years later, Ivan Cleary encountered Gould as a young player at the Sydney Roosters.
In his book Not Everything Counts … But Everything Matters, Cleary recall being struck by the way Gould thought about football:
From the very start, I was blown away by the way Gus saw the game.
Cleary remembers Gould’s tactics and strategy, but specifically mentions “the mental side of the footy”.
On one occasion Gould brought a psychologist in to speak to the players.
Cleary’s recollection is telling:
That sort of stuff was unheard of back then.
Perhaps it was to Cleary.
But it wasn’t to Gould.
Nearly two decades earlier, a teenage Phil Gould had been lying on the floor of a closed Sydney hotel while Roger Cowan asked him to relax, control his breathing and visualise himself playing the perfect game.
More Than an Eccentric Experiment
In Part 43 of Panthers, Passion & Politics, Roger talks about his longstanding fascination with what he called “the power of the unconscious to affect performance”.
He explored meditation, hypnosis, NLP and other approaches to changing patterns of thought. At various times he worked directly with Panthers players who were struggling with confidence or performance.
Read in isolation, Roger’s recollections might sound like the unusual interests of an unconventional chief executive.
Gould’s story adds something important.
It independently confirms that Roger was actually experimenting with these ideas in the Panthers football environment as early as 1978.
Care needs to be taken about claiming any more than that. There may have been others in rugby league experimenting with psychological preparation at the time, and there is no need to claim that Roger Cowan invented or pioneered sports psychology in the game.
But it is interesting enough that Roger was exploring the mental dimensions of sporting performance at a time when such ideas were far from commonplace in rugby league.
Intersting enough because he had plenty on his plate with the entire Panthers enterprise. Interesting enough given the label “anti-rugby-league” tat had been applied by some.
The first experiment produced a memorable win.
The second produced a long walk and a 26–9 defeat.
And the hypnotherapy sessions stopped for then.
But for one 19-year-old player, something remained.
More than forty years later, Phil Gould could still trace his interest in sports psychology back to those unusual afternoons at Penrith — an interest he would eventually carry into his own highly successful coaching career.
Perhaps Roger’s experiment achieved something after all.
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Unfortunately Gould does not name the player. The front-rowers on the day were John Farragher and Ross Cale. In the second row were Paul Merlo and Tas Batieri. ↩︎
For Roger Cowan, a problem was rarely just the incident that brought it to attention.
His instinct was to pull it apart. What was actually going wrong? Who was affected? What outcome was required? And, most importantly, could a system be designed that would produce that outcome more consistently?
It was an approach to problem-solving and decision-making he was embedding across the Panthers organisation throughout the 1990s — and one he believed was important to its continuing success.
Few examples illustrate that approach better than his work on rugby league’s judiciary.
The problem had bothered him for decades.
“Sit down, Mr Cowan”
As Roger recalled in Panthers, Passion & Politics, when he served on the NSW Rugby League executive committee in the early 1970s, judiciary decisions regularly created controversy. Penalties appeared inconsistent and clubs sometimes believed others were receiving more favourable treatment.
Eventually he tried to raise the issue at an executive meeting.
“I want to make a suggestion about the judiciary system,” he told chairman Bill Buckley.
“Sit down, Mr Cowan, you’re not here to talk about judiciary.”
Roger tried again.
“Sit down Mr Cowan or leave the meeting. You are out of order.”
That was the end of the discussion.
More than twenty years later, rugby league had changed dramatically — and was in the process of changing even more.
During the planning for Super League, the judiciary came up for discussion. Roger said he had “always had a passion for judiciary” and offered to prepare a paper.
This time the response was different.
“Terrific! Go ahead, do it.”
So he did.
Start with the outcome
The surviving working paper is dated 24 November 1995.
Its opening is revealing.
Roger did not begin by deciding who should sit on the judiciary or what punishment should apply to a high tackle.
He began by identifying what a better judiciary system should achieve. What is the outcome — what evidence will demonstrate the system is a success?
Among a list of outcomes were: reduced levels of public criticism of judiciary decisions; elimination of the perception that penalties were inconsistent or favoured particular clubs; less involvement of solicitors; reduced number of hearings and shorter duration; and elimination of appeals based simply on the severity of a sentence.
Before designing the machinery, he defined what the machinery was supposed to accomplish.
That changed the nature of the problem.
It wasn’t simply a question of whether an individual judiciary panel made the right or wrong decision. A system could produce perfectly defensible individual decisions and still create inconsistency, expense, delay and a perception of unfairness.
Roger’s proposal therefore attempted to move responsibility for consistency away from the discretion of whichever individuals happened to be sitting on a particular night and place much more of it within the system itself.
Separate guilt from penalty
At the centre of the proposal was a relatively simple distinction.
The judiciary should determine whether a player was guilty and, if so, what offence had been committed.
Ordinarily, it should not then decide the penalty from scratch.
Offences would instead be divided into clearly defined categories carrying predetermined penalties. Discounts and additional penalties could be applied according to defined circumstances.
A player whose guilt was clear could plead guilty, receive the appropriate discount and avoid a hearing altogether. A player maintaining innocence retained the right to have the case heard.
By January 1996, when Roger presented the proposal to Super League, the concept had been distilled into five principal elements:
experts should be used where necessary;
a Head of Judiciary should control the process;
there should be incentives for guilty pleas;
penalties should be predetermined, with the judiciary principally deciding guilt rather than sentence; and
hearings should generally occur only where a player pleaded not guilty.
The objective was not simply tougher or softer penalties.
It was greater consistency.
Design the process, not just the idea
Roger’s November paper went well beyond the broad concept.
It worked through what should happen from the time an incident occurred.
The Head of Judiciary would identify an appropriate charge and notify the player. Where necessary, expert analysis could be obtained. If that evidence exonerated the player, the matter ended. If it supported the charge, the player had another opportunity to plead guilty. If the player continued to maintain innocence, a judiciary hearing followed.
The proposal dealt with who should pay for expert evidence. It considered appeals and appeal fees. It provided for records of previous offences, discounts for guilty pleas and additional penalties in defined circumstances.
Roger even tried to anticipate the objections to what he was proposing.
One obvious objection to predetermined penalties was that no two incidents were exactly alike.
Surely a judiciary panel needed discretion to recognise the difference?
Roger’s answer wasn’t to ignore those differences and he produced the principle that offences a more precisely defined and graded.
A high tackle, for example, might be divided into 20 or more categories, each carrying its own penalty.
He also recognised the potential danger in relying upon expert analysis. If a new system placed greater weight on expert evidence and that evidence was subsequently shown to be wrong, confidence in the entire system could be damaged.
One proposed safeguard was a second expert opinion in controversial cases.
Even the media were considered part of the process.
Journalists and editors should have access to the schedules of offences, penalties, discounts and additions. Expert reports should be available and journalists invited to see the video evidence supporting them.
Public understanding wasn’t something to worry about after a decision had been made.
It was part of the system.
From weeks to points
Perhaps one of the most interesting ideas appears under the rather modest heading “Future Considerations.”
Roger had identified another problem.
If suspensions were expressed only in whole weeks, a carefully graded series of offences could still end up producing the same penalty. Several different levels of seriousness might all result in a one-week suspension.
So he considered a points system.
One hundred points could represent a one-week suspension. A penalty of 275 points could produce an immediate two-week suspension, with 75 points carried forward. Discounts and additions could also be expressed as points.
It allowed much finer distinctions between offences and circumstances.
The significance for this story is not simply the points themselves.
The working paper captures Roger’s thought process while it was happening:
If we solve this problem, what new problem might our solution create? And how might we solve that?
Not entirely Roger’s system
The proposal did not simply emerge from Roger’s office and become the Super League judiciary unchanged.
Roger himself was quite clear about that.
Many people became involved in developing the final system and compromises were made. His original submission was not adopted in its entirety, although he believed most of its principles survived.
That distinction becomes particularly important when the story reaches 1998.
By then Super League and the Australian Rugby League had come together in the new National Rugby League, and a decision had to be made about which judiciary system the unified competition would use.
The two systems were fundamentally different.
Roger attended meetings between representatives of the ARL and Super League attempting to reach agreement. According to his later account, those meetings achieved little and the question was eventually referred to the chief executives of the 20 clubs.
They heard submissions supporting both alternatives.
The result, Roger recorded, was 18 votes to two in favour of the Super League system — including support from 10 of the 12 former ARL clubs.
It appeared that the argument had been won.
Roger soon became convinced that something very different had happened.
The system meets the real world
By June 1998, the new NRL judiciary was attracting considerable public criticism.
This was the first season of the unified competition and the clubs had overwhelmingly chosen the Super League judiciary model. Yet some early decisions were already raising questions about whether the system being implemented was actually operating according to the principles the clubs had endorsed.
Two cases involving prominent players became particularly contentious.
Glenn Lazarus, playing for the Melbourne Storm on the eve of a State of Origin match, had received 130 points for a high tackle. With 100 points producing an automatic one-match suspension, the penalty would have ruled him out of State of Origin. The penalty was reduced to 99 points — allowing Lazarus to play Origin, leaving the 99 points to be carried forward.
Geoff Toovey’s circumstances were different. Due to his past judicial recorded any offences attracted a loading on a standard penalty. He — again enough for an automatic one-match suspension. Toovey’s points were reduced back to 75 Concerned that suspending a prominent and respected captain for such a minor offence would appear unreasonable, the authorities reduced his points to 75.2
Whatever the merits of either decision, both exposed a problem at the heart of a system intended to produce consistency.
If Lazarus’s circumstances justified reducing 130 points to 99, what would happen when the next player accumulated 130 points but did not have a State of Origin match approaching?
If Toovey’s standing in the game, or the relatively minor nature of the offence that triggered his suspension, justified reducing his accumulated points, would the same consideration be available to a less prominent player?
These were among the controversies being discussed publicly by radio broadcaster Ray Hadley.
Roger had been listening.
On 15 June 1998, he wrote Hadley a five-page letter. He agreed that a number of decisions during the season appeared “absurd from the public’s point of view”.
But Roger believed the controversy was being blamed on the wrong thing.
The problem, as he saw it, was not that the principles developed for the Super League judiciary had failed. It was that the NRL judiciary had departed from what he regarded as the most fundamental of those principles.
The difference came down to a deceptively simple question:
Who was responsible for consistency?
Under the old system, that responsibility rested substantially with the judiciary panel. Change the people and the interpretation — and potentially the outcomes — could change with them.
The Super League philosophy put much greater responsibility upon the administrators of the game.
The judiciary determined guilt. The rules and schedules provided consistency in penalty.
Those rules could be changed.
But when they changed, they changed for everyone.
Learn from the bad decision
This is where the Hadley letter perhaps reveals more about Roger’s thinking than the original proposal.
He did not suggest that his system would prevent every bad or controversial outcome.
Quite the opposite:
“No judiciary system will ever be perfect.”
What mattered was what happened when an imperfection became apparent.
A good system, he wrote, should produce greater consistency and generate its own improvements.
If a particular case exposed an unfair penalty, the administrators could change the schedule.
The next player committing the same or a closely comparable offence would then receive the new penalty.
The lesson from the controversial decision had been captured by the system.
That was fundamentally different from allowing a panel to produce a different result next time simply because its members regarded the circumstances differently.
The first approach changed the rule for everyone.
The second changed the decision for one person.
Lazarus, Toovey — and the next player
Roger’s response to the Lazarus and Toovey controversies was revealing.
He was not necessarily arguing that the concessions made to either player were wrong.
His concern was what happened the next time.
If there was a legitimate reason why Lazarus’s 130-point penalty should be reduced to 99, that reason should be identified and incorporated into the rules. Every future player satisfying the same conditions should then receive the same treatment.
The same principle applied to Toovey. If there was a legitimate reason why his circumstances warranted reducing the points that would otherwise have resulted in suspension, define that circumstance and make the concession available to every player who subsequently qualified for it.
The individual decision therefore became evidence.
If it revealed something wrong with the existing rules, fix the rules.
If it revealed a legitimate circumstance that had not previously been anticipated, incorporate that circumstance into the rules.
Either way, the system became better.
But not a system without judgement
Roger was not arguing for a completely mechanical judiciary.
His letter makes that clear.
Under the Super League system, the judiciary retained discretion to alter a penalty where it considered the circumstances of a particular case genuinely unusual. As far as Roger knew, that discretion had not been used during the Super League season.
The distinction is important.
His objective was not to eliminate judgement.
It was to prevent routine decisions from depending unnecessarily upon individual judgement — while retaining discretion for the genuinely exceptional case.
Consistency was the default.
Departure from it needed a reason.
Who cares what the system is?
Another surviving set of Roger’s notes from 1998 approaches the same issue from a different direction.
At the top of the page he posed a simple question:
Players cared. They wanted less time spent travelling to and attending hearings, equal treatment and a safer game.
Coaches cared. Judiciary appearances interfered with training; they wanted their players treated fairly and protected from dangerous play.
Chief executives cared about the time consumed by judiciary matters and the treatment of their players.
Financial managers cared about the cost of solicitors, witnesses and travel.
Supporters wanted confidence that their team was being treated equally. They also wanted the game’s best players playing rather than injured or suspended.
And the media?
Roger’s assessment was characteristically dry:
“As many opportunities as possible to create controversy.”
There is humour in the line, but the exercise itself is revealing.
Before judging whether a system was working, Roger was asking what the different people affected by it actually required from it.
Don’t fix the decision. Fix the system.
The surviving judiciary papers stretch from the original Super League proposal in November 1995, through its presentation and development in 1996, to Roger’s defence of its underlying principles in 1998.
Together they provide something more interesting than a claim about who devised rugby league’s judiciary.
They provide a small window into how Roger Cowan approached a problem.
Start by defining what you are trying to achieve.
Identify who is affected.
Separate the problem from the personalities involved.
Design a process rather than relying upon good intentions.
Build incentives into that process.
Anticipate objections.
Allow for exceptional circumstances.
And when the system produces an outcome that exposes a weakness, don’t simply correct the outcome.
Learn from it.
Change the system.
Then apply the improvement consistently to everyone who comes next.
It was an approach Roger applied repeatedly during his years at Panthers — to organisational structures, financial controls, strategic planning and football administration.
The judiciary happens to leave behind an unusually clear documentary trail showing that approach at work.
There is also a certain symmetry to the story.
In the early 1970s, Roger tried to suggest there might be a better way to administer rugby league’s judiciary.
He was told to sit down.
More than twenty years later, he was finally invited to develop the idea.
And when the new National Rugby League had to choose between two fundamentally different approaches, 18 of its 20 clubs voted for the system that had grown from that proposal.
For Roger, however, winning that argument was never quite the point.
The system still had to work.
And if it didn’t, the answer was not to abandon the principles behind it.
It was to find out why — and make the system better.
From the Panthers Passion Politics Digital Archives
The surviving documents behind this story provide an unusual opportunity to follow the development of Roger Cowan’s thinking about the rugby league judiciary — from his original proposal, through its presentation to Super League, to his response when he believed the principles behind the system were being compromised.
November 1995 — The Original Judiciary Proposal
Roger Cowan, 24 November 1995
Roger’s original working paper setting out the objectives of a proposed Super League judiciary system, its procedures and safeguards, and the problems it was intended to overcome. The document also includes his early consideration of replacing suspensions expressed solely in weeks with a points-based system.
The presentation prepared from the earlier working paper, distilling the proposal into its principal elements for consideration by Super League. It shows how the more detailed November proposal was developed into a practical model for discussion and implementation.
These working notes approach the judiciary from another direction: who is affected by the system, and what does each group need from it? Roger considers the interests of players, coaches, chief executives, financial managers, supporters, administrators and the media.
Written during controversy surrounding the judiciary in the first NRL season, this five-page letter explains Roger’s concern that the system being implemented had departed from a fundamental principle of the Super League model: consistency should reside principally in the rules and procedures rather than depend upon individual decisions. The letter discusses the Glenn Lazarus and Geoff Toovey cases and explains how Roger believed apparent anomalies should be used to improve the system.
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This was another technique Roger encouraged in the decision-making process throughout Panthers — this took various forms and names depending on the specific circumstance. One was use deBono’s “Six Hat Thinking” where the Black Hat was engaged to argue against the idea. Using the process developed by Mike Basch of Federal Express, there was a section title “Things We Must Overcome” where the challenges were listed and anything that “killed” the diea identified. ↩︎
In Round 1 of the 1998 unified season Brisbane played Manly in Brisbane. Bill Harrigan was the referee. Early in the match Harrigan sent Toovey to the sin-bin for dissent about a decision. In the last 30 seconds of the game John Hopoate was sent of for referee abuse. Wtin seconds Toovey was also sent and the charge was also abuse. ↩︎
Throughout Panthers, Passion & Politics, five Panthers directors — John Bateman, Greg Evans, Craig Terry, Geoff James and Denis Coffey — are frequently referred to as the Footy Five.
It is a useful description — maybe too useful.
The five directors became linked during a period of increasing disagreement within the Panthers Board. The first public indication of a division came with Ron Mulock’s press release of 6 September 1999.1Even then, however, neither the directors involved nor any particular grouping of them was publicly identified.
The name Footy Five would not be applied until more than two years later.
The position was more complicated.
The stand-alone issue placed these five directors on the same side of an important disagreement. All directors wanted Panthers to remain independently represented in the highest level of rugby league.
The different “sides” developed well after the 1998 Information Night.2 The division was about whether Panthers should continue investigating possible amalgamation arrangements as protection against the possibility that remaining independent might ultimately prove impossible.
But the five agreeing on that issue did not mean agreement on everything else, nor necessarily the existence of the later faction.
As John Bateman recalled in his January 2007 correspondence with Jennie Bentley:
Any real unison between ourselves [the group eventually labelled “Footy Five”] emerged much later during the period March-September 2002 when the Board was facing major problems associated with licenced club amalgamations.
By then, the differences within the Board had become much more visible.3
And the name that emerged was extraordinarily effective.
More Than a Name
At its simplest, Footy Five identified five directors and reflected their particular concern for the interests of the football club.
Political labels are rarely quite that simple.
To start, calling one group the Footy Five inevitably also labelled the other four directors. If these five directors represented football, where did that leave the other directors?
It helped reduce complicated disagreements over governance and the future direction of Panthers to a simple binary proposition:
one side was for football; the other side was not
That distinction was powerful.
It was also an oversimplification.
Perhaps that should not be surprising. The term was created by Ron Mulock, someone with considerable experience in politics and political campaigning, and it framed the approaching board election with considerable effectiveness.
Yet the issues then dividing the Board were complex. They involved club amalgamations, governance, members’ rights and benefits, commitments made to members of amalgamating clubs and, ultimately, competing views about the direction Panthers was taking.
For some of the Footy Five, however, these issues were connected to football.
Their fear was that the club amalgamations might eventually produce a “reverse takeover” of Panthers. A changed membership and governance structure, they believed, could reopen the possibility of a football merger. Some went further, suspecting that management itself might be orchestrating such an outcome.
Whether those fears were justified belongs to the later story. What matters here is that, by the time the Footy Five name emerged, trust between management and the majority of the Board had substantially eroded.
The disagreements were real. So too were differences in philosophy and priorities.
But the suggestion that one group cared about football while the other did not was precisely the characterisation challenged throughout Jennie Bentley’s original manuscript.
All wanted Panthers to survive as a stand-alone club.
One view was that the organisation should concentrate its resources and energy on achieving the stand-alone objective. The other was that prudent management also required investigation and preparation of alternatives that everyone hoped would never be needed.
That is a much more subtle proposition than pro-football versus anti-football.
Looking Back Through a Later Label
There is another consequence of the effectiveness of the Footy Five name.
It stuck!
Once the five directors became identified in that way, the term was a convenient shorthand for describing them — including when looking backwards at events that had occurred before the name existed.
Panthers, Passion & Politics does this too.
The original manuscript regularly refers to the Footy Five while describing earlier events. This can create the impression that the grouping, the name and the political division it came to represent already existed in their later form.
It is an impression needing some qualification.
The five directors were there. They sometimes shared positions on important issues. And their relationships and influence upon one another were developing. Those earlier disagreements became part of the history that eventually produced the later Board division.
But they were not yet publicly — or privately — defined as the Footy Five.
Describing the five directors in an earlier dispute as the Footy Five makes it very tempting to interpret that dispute through the lens of what came later: football against business, football supporters against their opponents, or ultimately the Footy Five against people supposedly less committed to the game.
It is also easy to fall into the trap of believing there was a dispute over standing alone — there was not!
The contemporary story was more complicated.
The Power of Retrospect
This is one of the difficulties of telling history.
Later events give names and meanings to things that may have appeared quite differently to those experiencing them at the time.
A memorable label makes a complicated story easier to tell. Eventually it can become so familiar that it seems always to have existed.
And The Footy Five is undoubtedly a memorable label.
Its effectiveness can perhaps be measured by the fact that the terminology was eventually adopted retrospectively in the original account of these events — and subsequently in this project.
For Panthers, Passion & Politics, that requires a small but important editorial correction.
Where the term Footy Five is used in connection with events preceding the later Board conflict and election, it should generally be understood as retrospective shorthand for the five directors who later became known as the Footy Five.
It simply avoids allowing a highly effective later political label to define an earlier debate more neatly than the evidence warrants.
And in a story so often concerned with the power of perception, language and public narrative, that distinction seems particularly worth making.
Roger Cowan believed the faction — later labelled Footy Five — was well defined by late 1999 when they forced Leo Armstrong to relinquish his long-held position as chairman. ↩︎
The companion article explained how Panthers changed the way it thought. This article asks the obvious next question: did that change in thinking actually change the club’s fortunes?
One of the earliest outcomes of the strategic reset was the appointment of Tim Sheens as Manager-Coach
The “Coach” part of Sheens’ role delivered quickly, the team performance in the 1984 season was in stark contrast to the seasons before. His impact was roundly recognised and applauded by all, including his peers.
Sydney Morning Herald 20 Sep 1984 — click to read
But the “Manager” part of the Manager-Coach role was more strategic, as was the role of the Five by Five Committee.
The stated goal — to have five local juniors named as Kangaroos within 5 years — was really about something far more valuable: to shift the Club’s trajectory.
Was it successful?
Let’s look first at that main goal.
Player
Representative Team
First Chosen
Penrith Junior
Royce Simmons
Australia
1986
No
Greg Alexander
Australia
1986
Yes
John Cartwright
Australia
1990
Yes
Mark Geyer
Australia
1990
Yes
Brad Fittler
Australia
1990
Yes
Brad Izzard*
NSW
1990
Yes
Steve Carter
NSW
1992
No
Graham Mackay
Australia
1992
No
*Brad Izzard had represented NSW in 1982 — before the strategic reset.
The Committee narrowly missed its stated target. More importantly, however, the effort reflected a broader ambition—to create a football club that the district could believe in and one capable of producing representative players consistently rather than occasionally.
Winning Games
The following table shows the results of the regular season games for the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. The Panthers won almost twice as many regular-season games during the decade following the strategic reset as they had during the preceding decade.
1974-1983
1984-1993
Games Played
228
228
Games Won
66
123
Win Percentage
29%
54%
Attack and Defence (Tries Scored & Tries Against)
The following table shows the tries scored and conceded during the regular season for the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. Note: I’ve used tries rather than points here because the value of the try changed from 3 to 4 in 1983.
The Panthers attack improved by 4% which is inconsequential. More importantly defence improved by 38%.
1974-1983
1984-1993
Games Played
228
228
Total Tries Scored
614
638
Total Tries Against
872
539
Tries For – Tries Against
-258
+99
The improvement in defence is extremely important – Strong defensive records are widely regarded as one of the defining characteristics of premiership-winning teams. Defence speaks volumes about the character and culture of a club – the change represents a distinct shift in both for the Penrith Panthers.
Overall, the Panthers’ tries-for-and-against differential moved from –258 to +99—a turnaround of 357 tries. In other words, they went from consistently being outscored to consistently outscoring their opponents.
Final Ladder Position
The numbers above suggest a big difference in performance of Penrith team before and after the changes put in place between the 1983 and 1984 seasons.
As to the trajectory. The graph below shows the finishing position of the Panthers for the 10 years before (red) and the 10 years after (blue) the late 1983 changes.
There is a distinct and positive difference between the two decades in being compared.
A further consequence of the change …
The following table shows average home crowd for regular season games, comparing the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. Crowds increased by 20%.
Home Games
1974-1983
1984-1993
Played
114
114
Total Attendance
871,042
1,047,261
Average Crowd
7,641
9,187
Conclusion
No single committee, coach or governance reform can claim sole responsibility for the transformation of Penrith Panthers during the 1980s. However, the evidence strongly suggests that the strategic reset undertaken in late 1983 fundamentally altered the club’s direction. The Five by Five Committee did not achieve its headline target exactly as written, but the broader ambition—to reshape the football club’s future—was overwhelmingly realised.
In the 2001 publication Hooked On League: Royce Simmons1, Royce tells the story of Darryl Brohman asking his advice, at the end of 1983, about an offer he’d received to move to Canterbury-Bankstown. Royce’s advice paints a clear picture of the state of the Penrith Panthers at that time:
… thanks for thinking of us but right now we’ve got five players on contract and you’re a free agent being chased by probably the best club in the world.
The reasoning behind Royce’s that advice is also telling:
I don’t think he wanted to leave us high and dry but we told him that we were high and dry whether he stayed or not.
Simmons’ view was that “things were looking bleak” for Penrith.
In fact, things were so bleak, even the independently run Panthers Supporters Club had dissolved at the end of 1983 and needed its own reset. The supporter’s club had two Panther diehard supporters — Cathy O’Kane and Berryl Moss who took on the task of whipping up wider support for the 1984 Season and beyond.
Penrith Press 12 Oct 1983 — click to read
And Panthers had Roger Cowan who had finally been granted the governance structure he’d so long been advocating.
The Change
One of Cowan’s first steps under the new One Board, One CEO structure was to involve more people in finding solutions to serious problems. Problems like the performance of the rugby league team.
Royce had been weighing up whether to leave Penrith when he was invited to join the effort to find those solutions. He described that first step to a reset of football fortunes.
Prior to the start of the 1984 season Roger Cowan organised a series of seminars at Penrith Leagues Club — a ‘think-tank’ involving prominent Penrith business people, junior rugby league administrators, past and present players, and local community leaders. In one of the groups, Tim Sheens’ name came up as a possible coach.
It was an approach that mirrored what he had done with the licensed club in the early days of his tenure.
This symposium produced a range of strategies and goals, two of the goals had a significant impact on Panthers football performance.
The first, most immediate, goal was to secure Sheens for the coaching position — it was late in 1983, training for the 1984 season needed to begin soon yet Penrith had few players and no coach. This was a pressing need. And it was a challenging task given the fact Sheens had sold his real estate business and was preparing up to move his family to Queensland.
Royce worked in the background to get Sheens to stay, but says:
I’m sure Roger Cowan worked the hardest to convince Tim to take on the job.
[He] really went out of the way to chase hard and talk Tim out of going. The players played a supporting role in letting Tim know that we’d support him.
Tim signed on as the club’s first Manager-Coach.
Appointing a Manager-Coach was unusual in the rugby league world — although it was a pressing short-term need to appoint Sheens as coach, expanding the role was a strategic move.
The second goal was more long-term and strategic — to have 5 Penrith juniors selected for the Kangaroos — the Australian Rugby League team. A Five by Five Committee was established to take responsibility for developing initiatives to achieve this goal.
Penrith Press Front Page 26 October 1983 — click to read
Don Feltis was a member of this Committee:
We talked about strategies and all the rugby league development issues … like making sure our best juniors were selected into representative squads; to set up development squads — age groups between the representative squads — like 13s, 15s and 17s and give them personalised coaching; panels to interview possible coaches and to have only the best coaches — and to have all our coaching techniques standardised so that all our juniors from 13s to 19s were getting similar tuition … under the guidance of Tim Sheens.
It was a great exercise and made a lot of difference to the future development of our club. … it made us all wake up and realise all the things we had to do to be successful. Roger had always been a dreamer … a visionary. He realised we had to lift our club up from the level we were performing at.
A Different Way of Thinking — from Goals to Outcomes
The stated goal of the Five-by-Five Committee was to have five home-grown players represent Australia within five years.
Looking back, this appears to have been an early example of a planning philosophy Roger Cowan would later apply much more broadly throughout the Panthers organisation. That philosophy centred around “outcomes thinking“.
This goal was an outcome – a description of a future that would be proof of a successful project. During the 90s at Panthers this would have been framed:
In November 1999 (5 Seasons away) the Australian Kangaroos have included five representatives from Panthers who were developed in the Penrith Junior Rugby League District.
Working backwards from that future enabled a more creative approach to uncovering the initiatives, programs and strategies that would have a positive effect on creating that future. Initiatives like those described by Don Feltis above.
The Five-by-Five goal was never intended as a prediction. It was a deliberately ambitious picture of what success would look like if the club fundamentally changed the way it developed players in their huge junior catchment area.
Quite quickly early indicators drove some optimism — the governance model reduced conflict, Cathy and Berryl re-launched the supporters’ club, Tim Sheens had players wanting to stay, and the team began making its way up the competition ladder.2
Sydney Morning Herald 28 May 1984
Continue:The 1983 Strategic Reset — Did It Work? examines whether the strategic changes introduced in late 1983 produced measurable improvements in the Panthers’ football performance over the following decade.
Hooked On League: Royce Simmons with Alan Whiticker published 2001. Chapter 19. ↩︎
The headline in the SMH clipping is dramatic but not accurate – Penrith had been in the top 5 before, a few times but only once before had they been there after at least 5 rounds of a season. ↩︎
In 1990, while preparing for Panthers’ first ever rugby league Grand Final appearance, Roger Cowan read a management article that changed the way he thought about organisations.
The article was Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow, written by American management academic Larry E. Greiner and first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1972. It would become one of the most influential pieces of management writing Cowan ever encountered and the catalyst for a complete reassessment of how Panthers should be managed.
A Different Way of Looking at Growth
Greiner challenged one of the most common assumptions about successful organisations—that growth is simply a matter of becoming bigger.
Instead, he argued that growing organisations pass through a series of distinct developmental stages. Each period of relatively stable growth, which he called an evolutionary phase, eventually reaches a point where the existing structure, management style and systems can no longer cope with the organisation’s increasing size and complexity.
At that point, growth stalls.
Frustrations build.
Old methods begin to fail.
The organisation enters what Greiner described as a revolutionary phase—a period of crisis requiring significant organisational change before growth can continue.
His central message was both simple and powerful:
The practices that create one period of successful growth eventually become the obstacles to the next.
Successful organisations recognise these moments and adapt. Those that fail to change often stagnate or decline.
The Five Stages
Greiner identified five broad stages through which many organisations pass:
Growth through Creativity – entrepreneurial energy establishes the organisation until stronger leadership becomes necessary.
Growth through Direction – clearer structures and management systems bring stability but eventually create demands for greater autonomy.
Growth through Delegation – authority is pushed down through the organisation, creating faster decision-making before coordination problems begin to emerge.
Growth through Coordination – increasingly formal systems and procedures restore control but, over time, can create excessive bureaucracy or what Greiner called a “red tape” crisis.
Growth through Collaboration – organisations move beyond rigid structures, relying more on teamwork, flexibility, shared responsibility and cooperation across traditional departmental boundaries.
Greiner stressed that these stages were not rigid rules applying to every organisation. Rather, they described a recurring pattern observed in many growing businesses.
Why This Resonated with Roger Cowan
As Cowan read the article, he came to a stark realisation.
Panthers had already experienced several of the evolutionary and revolutionary cycles Greiner described.
Looking back over twenty-five years, he remembered periods when growth appeared to stall, followed by difficult struggles to overcome new problems. Once solutions had been found, the organisation would enter another period of rapid growth before eventually confronting the next set of challenges.
What had previously seemed like isolated management problems suddenly appeared as part of a much larger pattern.
Most importantly, the conclusion he’d arrived at in 1990 was profound:
The Panthers employing 850 people was not simply a larger version of the Panthers employing 300 people. It had become a fundamentally different organisation.
The management systems that had delivered outstanding results during one phase of growth could not be assumed to work indefinitely. Panthers needed new ways of thinking if it was to continue developing.
A Beginning, Not an Answer
The Greiner article did not provide a blueprint for Panthers’ future.
Rather, it provided a framework for asking better questions.
For him, the issue was ultimately one of organisational unity.
It convinced Cowan that the club needed to rethink almost every aspect of its management philosophy and organisational structure. That realisation triggered an intensive period of reading, research and experimentation as Panthers searched for new ideas capable of supporting its next stage of growth.
Many of the management changes introduced during the early 1990s can be traced back to that moment of discovery.
Looking back years later, Cowan often described reading Greiner’s article as one of the defining moments of his management career—not because it supplied all the answers, but because it fundamentally changed the questions he was asking.
Source Material
For those readers who wish to read the Larry Greiner article (PDF) in full:
Readers of Parts 19–21 may wonder why Roger Cowan spent more than sixteen years arguing for what appeared to be a relatively simple administrative reform. Why did the issue matter so much to him? Why did he keep returning to it despite repeated setbacks, opposition and criticism?
The answer lies in a question that had troubled Panthers almost from the beginning:
How could the Club pursue a unified direction when rugby league and the licensed club were governed separately?
The issue was not new.
Readers familiar with the events of 1971 may recognise some familiar themes. The removal of football club secretary Merv Cartwright and treasurer Ron Partridge arose from concerns about the administration of rugby league affairs and accountability for financial decisions. Although the circumstances were different, the disputes that emerged again in the late 1970s centred on many of the same questions. Who should make decisions? Who should be accountable for those decisions? And what happened when agreements were not honoured?
From the time Penrith entered first grade rugby league in 1967, the football club and licensed club operated under separate governance structures. The arrangement was common in rugby league, but Roger increasingly came to believe it created problems that could never be fully resolved.
It would be easy to assume the conflict was simply about money. Certainly finances played a part. Rugby league required increasing investment, while the licensed club was trying to strengthen its financial position and pursue long-term development projects. Yet Roger’s frustration was not that football sought resources. In his view, the licensed club had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to support rugby league and invest heavily in its future.
The real problem arose after decisions had been made.
Budgets would be negotiated. Agreements would be reached. Plans would be approved. Yet time and again, football expenditure exceeded agreed limits or new commitments were entered into without the knowledge or approval of those responsible for managing the Club’s overall finances.
From Roger’s perspective, this was not simply a financial problem. It made long-term planning almost impossible.
A licensed club board could approve a football budget, commit to major development projects and make decisions based upon expected cash flows. If those assumptions later proved incorrect because spending commitments had changed, the consequences extended well beyond rugby league. The entire organisation could be affected.
By the late 1970s, these tensions had become increasingly public. In December 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on financial difficulties and disagreements between the football and licensed club administrations. Around the same time, Panthers was preparing for the enormous financial challenge of constructing its new Mulgoa Road complex.
SMH 1979 Dec 9 – click image for full article.
Reports to members in 1980 revealed the extent of the concern. Directors reported that the football club had exceeded an agreed annual budget of $485,000 by more than $100,000 during 1979, while additional commitments had already been entered into for the following season. To the licensed club board, the issue was not simply the amount involved. It was that decisions affecting the future of the entire organisation had been made outside the framework that had previously been agreed.
These events helped bring the governance debate to a head, but they do not fully explain Roger’s determination.
For him, the issue was ultimately one of organisational unity.
He believed Panthers would never achieve its potential while parts of the organisation operated according to different priorities, different assumptions and different lines of accountability. A football club and licensed club could share the same colours, the same members and the same ambitions, yet still find themselves working against each other.
His solution was straightforward.
One board would determine policy and direction for the entire organisation. Management would then be responsible for implementing those decisions. Everyone would work towards the same agreed objectives and everyone would be accountable to the same governing body.
Not everyone agreed.
Some viewed Roger’s campaign as an attempt to centralise power. The perception is understandable. After all, he was advocating a structure that would eventually place responsibility for football and licensed club operations under a single administration. His persistence over sixteen years inevitably raised questions about motive.
Yet there is another interpretation.
Roger was not arguing that football should receive less support. Nor was he arguing that rugby league was less important than the licensed club. Rather, he believed the entire organisation should operate according to a common plan and that all parts of Panthers should be accountable to that plan.
Many years later, Panthers would use concepts such as “twin citizenship” to describe the idea that people belonged not only to their immediate team but also to the wider organisation. While that language did not exist in the 1970s, the philosophy behind it helps explain Roger’s thinking. He wanted rugby league, club management, directors and staff to see themselves as contributors to a single enterprise rather than separate interests competing for influence.
The first major breakthrough came in 1980 when a single board was finally established. Yet even then, the model remained incomplete. Rugby league and the licensed club continued under separate chief executives. As described in Parts 20 and 21, the compromise produced its own difficulties and did not resolve the underlying tensions.
It was not until the end of 1983 that the structure Roger had advocated for so long was fully implemented. One board and one chief executive became responsible for the entire organisation.
Whether that decision alone explains the improvements that followed is impossible to know. Organisations are rarely transformed by a single reform. Nevertheless, the years that followed saw a stronger emphasis on cooperation, planning and shared ownership. The workshops that led to the Five by Five program, closer relationships throughout the rugby league district and a more integrated approach to football and club operations all emerged during this period.
Reasonable people may still disagree about whether Roger was right. They may also disagree about the extent to which later successes flowed from the governance reforms he championed.
What is difficult to dispute is that he regarded the issue as fundamental. For more than sixteen years he returned to the same argument, often in the face of resistance and disappointment.
Ironically, that persistence contributed to one of the enduring myths about Roger Cowan — that he was somehow anti-rugby league.
The evidence suggests a more complex reality.
His long campaign for “One Board, One CEO” was not driven by a desire to diminish rugby league, but by a belief that Panthers could only achieve lasting success when every part of the organisation was working towards the same goals and operating under the same commitments.
Whether one agrees with that belief or not, it became one of the defining ideas in the history of Panthers.
Source Material*
The following documents are extracts of the relevant sections of larger reports:
The following material draws upon club publications from the early and mid-1970s, later interviews and recollections from former Panthers staff and executives.
By the mid-1970s, Penrith Rugby League Club was doing something few licensed clubs in Australia would even have contemplated — experimenting with computerised gaming and security systems.
The project emerged from a practical problem. As poker machine revenue increased across the club industry, so too did concerns about theft, scams, inefficient cash handling and poor operational oversight. Panthers had already experienced some of these issues directly. Roger Cowan believed tighter systems and better information could reduce losses and improve efficiency.
What followed was an ambitious venture into electronics and computer technology through a company known as F.C. Electronics Pty Ltd.
Contemporary club material described F.C. Electronics as producing “probably the world’s most sophisticated poker machine security system”. While that language reflected the promotional enthusiasm of the period, there is little doubt the system was unusually advanced for an Australian club environment of the 1970s.
The system attempted to electronically monitor poker machine activity from a central control point.
Early F.C. Electronics monitoring reports published by Panthers during the 1970s showed the system identifying jackpots, abnormal machine activity and security irregularities. Click image to enlarge.
According to material published by the club, poker machine events were coded and transmitted to television monitors around the club, allowing supervisors to immediately identify jackpots and machine activity. The system also attempted to monitor irregularities including abnormal wheel movement, door openings and jackpot inconsistencies.
The operation relied on technology that, at the time, would have appeared extraordinary to most club employees and patrons. The club’s own promotional material featured computer consoles, printers, monitoring screens and electronic reporting systems — all at a time when many organisations still relied entirely on manual record keeping.
Promotional page for F.C. Electronics showed an interconnected monitoring and reporting system linking poker machines to central computer and television displays. Click image to enlarge.
Former Panthers executive Bryn Miller later recalled that the system was “so far ahead of its time” that most clubs did not even possess a computer when Panthers was experimenting with electronic monitoring and reporting.
The project extended beyond poker machine security. F.C. Electronics also produced industrial control equipment and commercial products including lighting dimmers and environmental control systems. Club publications noted that the company’s capabilities had expanded sufficiently for it to seek work beyond the club industry itself.
Yet the venture also carried substantial cost and risk.
Club material acknowledged that F.C. Electronics operated at a financial loss during part of this period, while Roger Cowan later conceded that Panthers may have persisted with the project longer than it should have. Had the technology evolved commercially the way he hoped, the rewards may have been significant. Instead, the project became one of several ambitious experiments that pushed the club into areas rarely explored by licensed clubs of the era.
Club journal material outlined the broader ambitions of F.C. Electronics, which expanded into industrial and commercial electronic products beyond gaming systems. Click image to enlarge.
Even so, many who observed the system believed its core ideas eventually became standard throughout the gaming industry. Automated monitoring, centralised reporting, electronic jackpot recording and machine data analysis are now routine parts of modern club gaming operations.
In that sense, the Feeney Electronics project reflected something larger about the Panthers administration during the Cowan years. The club was rarely content simply to follow established practice. Whether the experiments succeeded or failed, there was often a willingness to try ideas that others considered unrealistic, premature or unnecessarily ambitious.
Feeney Electronics was one of the clearest examples of that philosophy in action.
Image Credits: All images in this post — including the feature image — are from Panthers Annual Reports. These were kindly provided by The Ausburn Collection.
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In February 1966, the Penrith Rugby League Football Club published the first edition of its official members’ journal.
The publication, issued monthly, was introduced at a critical point in the club’s development — as it sought admission to the New South Wales Rugby League First Division.
A central feature of the journal was a column titled From the Secretary’s Desk, written by Roger Cowan in his role as Secretary-Manager. In the opening issue, Cowan outlined club activities, membership growth and upcoming events, and referred to the club’s ambition of securing promotion to First Division.
The magazine was largely written and produced by Cowan and served as a means of communicating with members during the club’s First Division campaign.
In June 1968, Phyro Holdings Pty Ltd was registered, with Roger and Phyllis Cowan as directors. The name itself was derived from their first names — Phy from Phyllis and Ro from Roger.
In the years that followed, responsibility for publishing the club’s magazine — The Panthers Magazine — was transferred to Phyro Holdings under an arrangement approved by the club committee. The structure included conditions relating to profit limits, auditing of accounts and the remuneration deetails of Cowan’s role.
The arrangement formalised the transfer of publication responsibilities from the club to Phyro Holdings, under agreed financial and audit conditions.
The magazine arrangement — and the broader financial relationship between the club and Phyro Holdings — was later subject to scrutiny. Questions raised in subsequent decades focused on governance, transparency and the management of related-party transactions.
The Panthers Magazine became much more than a publication for PRLC members – it was a powerful community voice and was distributed to over 200,000 households in the Penrith Junior Rugby League District – Katoomba to Blacktown.
Those issues are examined in more detail in later sections of this project.
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 