The Morningside Australian Football Club, also known as the Morningside Panthers, is an Australian rules football club based at Jack Esplen Oval in the suburb of Hawthorne in Brisbane. The club consists of Masters, Amateurs, Women's, Junior and Senior football sections. Its senior team competed in the North East Australian Football League competition in 2011–14 and now is a member club of the Queensland Australian Football League. Its junior sides compete in the AFL Brisbane Juniors competition. The club also caters for young girls and boys by running Auskick skills clinics, which are held at the beginning of the season and do not involve competitive games. Morningside Football Club has operated successfully as a football club in Brisbane for over 50 years and is one of the most widely recognised Queensland based AFL clubs within Australia. It developed from the Hawthorne Juniors club which was founded in 1931.
Recent history
At the beginning of the 2000 season the members of both clubs voted unanimously to join and form one united club. This decision was made to strengthen the club socially, financially and to improve the junior player development programmes and created a player path to the elite AFLQ State League competition. Morningside has provided some of the best Queensland-bred Australian rules footballers of the last 50 years, including triple-premiership winning Brisbane Lions captain Michael Voss and his teammate fullback Mal Michael, Voss's brother Brett Voss. Current players include dashing half-back Courtenay Dempsey of Essendon, the left-footed in-and-under midfielder David Armitage of St Kilda and recently debuted Tom Bell of Carlton, nicknamed the next "Kouta" referring to Blues legend Anthony Koutoufides. At the beginning of 2011, the QAFL was merged to form the "North-East Australian Football League", combining Sydney and Canberra teams with the best QAFL teams, including the Northern Territory Thunder, Gold Coast Suns, GWS and Sydney Swansreserves team all compete in the competition as well as the Brisbane Lions reserves. There are two conferences with Morningside playing in the Northern Conference alongside fellow rivals Mt Gravat and Southport, among others. In the NEAFL's inaugural year, Morningside played Northern Territory in the Northern Conference Final, in which they were beaten by 87 points. Northern Territory went on to beat Eastern champion Ainslie.
