Belt Up Regional Festival of Football comes to Albany with workshops and showpiece games on the calendar

Albany is this week hosting the Belt Up Regional Festival of Football, a calendar of events culminating with two National Premier League WA soccer matches at Retravision Stadium on Saturday. Before the showpiece games, there will be a club development and safeguarding workshop, a coach education workshop, a girls’ carnival and a women in football networking breakfast. The club development and safeguarding workshop will be held on Tuesday before the coach education workshop on Thursday. The regional girls event will be on Friday at Retravision Stadium and is followed by an open training session from the NPL WA teams. On Saturday’s breakfast panel will be Football West chief executive Jamie Harnwell, female football and advocacy manager Sarah Carroll, Albany Rovers coach Cassie Paxman and former Albany Caledonians star Shelley Thompson. The NPL WA games will feature a women’s contest between Hyundai NPL Academy and Perth Azzurri and a men’s game with Perth Glory tackling Bayswater City. There will also be matches featuring the men’s and women’s Great Southern 2025 country week sides. The senior women’s team which won the 2025 tournament on debut will tackle the under-18 squad who were runners-up in their event at 11.30am. The senior men will face the Esperance country week side, with kick-off at 9.30am.