The Sandringham Football Club, nicknamed the Zebras, is an Australian rules football club playing in the Victorian Football League (VFL). It has an AFL reserves affiliation with the St Kilda Football Club.

History

Sandringham entered the VFA competition (now VFL) for the 1929 season, although first steps towards establishing a semi-professional football team from the Sandringham region began two years earlier. The club was formed in that time as a three-way merge of the existing amateur clubs in the area, Sandringham Amateurs, Black Rock FC and Hampton Amateurs. The club colours of gold, black and blue were taken from those three local teams respectively. In the clubs' first 10 years of existence, they achieved a season finish of no better than 5th place, which came in the 1933 season. Sandringham recorded its inaugural premiership in the 1946 season, coming from behind late in the final quarter to record a 7-point win over Camberwell in front of 30,000 spectators. Though the club struggled throughout the 1950s, it has since gone on to record 10 premierships in total, being one of the most consistent teams in the VFL, their most successful period coming in the 2000s, with 4 premierships in 10 years cementing the club as one of the premier teams in the league. The Zebras' home ground is and almost always has been the Beach Oval, which was renamed the Trevor Barker Beach Oval in the 1990s after the death of Trevor Barker, who had coached Sandringham to the 1992 and 1994 premierships. Only in 1966 did the club change home grounds, spending a year at the Junction Oval in St Kilda before moving back to Beach Oval ahead of the 1967 season. From the 2018 season, the club will play three of its home games each year at Moorabbin Oval, and will wear St Kilda's black, red and white guernsey in these games. The oval has a single grandstand (the Neil Bencraft Grandstand), a south end named after Nick Sautner (the Sautner Goal), and an administration centre (the John Mennie Administration Centre) – a social club and a capacity of 10,000. A record crowd of 18,000 attended the venue's first Sunday VFA premiership game, held between Sandringham and Port Melbourne Football Club in April 1964. A Rec Footy competition is also played at the ground.

Affiliations

The Zebras have an alignment agreement with Australian Football League (AFL) club St Kilda which has been in place since 2009. The alignment agreement means that St Kilda listed players who are able to play but not selected for the Saints in the AFL are available to be selected for the Zebras in the VFL. The clubs extended their agreement at the end of 2016. Previously, Sandringham had an alignment with Melbourne. Sandringham and Melbourne were the first two clubs to form an alignment. This was announced in 1999 and began in the 2000 season. The alignment had an immediate effect with Sandringham winning the premiership in 2000, and a further three premierships (2004, 2005 and 2006) were won during the affiliation. In October 2023, St Kilda announced that, beginning at the 2025 AFL rookie draft, it would use one of its rookie list places to draft a Sandringham player. However, at the 2025 rookie draft, which was held in November 2024, this did not occur.

Honours

Club

Individual

JJ Liston Trophy Winners (8) 1929 – Edward Bourke 1947 – Stan Tomlins 1962 – Keith Burns 1985 – Neil McLeod 1992 – Joe Rugolo 1997 – Justin Crough 2003 – David Robbins 2005 – Paul Johnson

Seasons

VFA/VFL Grand Finals

VFA/VFL Club Records

Notable former players