While the meeting focused heavily on a need for many hands to make running the club light work - McLeish says he won't continue on as president if more people don't become part of the club's committee - the outsourcing of players was also a big point of discussion.

"We really need a strong commitment from the community for the next five year period, not just a season-by-season," he said.

Discussion around contracting and the payment of outsourced players made it clear several members of the Cowra league community are uncomfortable with the ongoing costs of sustaining a competitive Cowra side in Group 10.

McLeish estimated the payment of the senior men's players and coach was "well-over the $50-60,000 mark at times".

"The outsourcing of players is an absolute necessity to stay competitive," he added.

"I don't think anybody's going to argue with that, we don't have the player base to stay competitive as a first grade side in Group 10.

"How long can we sustain that for? Because the costs of that are rising and rising and rising.

"I've got moral issues with what we're paying ... we've got cockies out there, [who] can't feed their stock, and we're spending that much money on a footy club."

While several options were floated as alternatives, the widely-reported but mostly theoretical suggestion of moving to the Woodbridge Cup was widely frowned upon by those in attendance.

"You wouldn't want to bring your kids through juniors and send them to the Woodbridge Cup," junior Magpies president Justin Gunn said, who was also scathing about the make-up of the playing lists of nearby Woodbridge teams Canowindra and Grenfell.

McLeish also admitted that when a well-credentialed team like this year's Magpies outfit under-performs, that also creates financial pressures supplementary to the players' contracts.

"Not having a home semi-final hurt," McLeish said.

"We probably built a team that should've absolutely been playing at least one home semi-final. However injuries, and the things that got in our way this year, makes it frustrating."

By the end of the meeting, there was a general consensus towards investigating ways of managing and reducing the expenditure on outsourcing players ahead of next month's AGM.

But McLeish's final comments, about an obvious difficulty of implementing any potential future plan, were telling.

"If that means starting from scratch and building a team over a four year period to really get in the game on the fifth year, then that's what we'll do," he said.

"But we've just got to get those players to buy into that plan and that's not easy to do. Players want to win, there's no doubt about that. I'm not sure I want a bloke in my team that doesn't want to win."