Orange and Forbes will join forces in the AFL Central West junior season

The Forbes Swamp Tigers planned to begin their life as a club in 2020 with a season of Auskick before COVID impacted those plans.

The following year, the club once again garnered interest from its junior players, but did not have enough to form their own team.

"We were looking at merging with another club, but it fell over, so we went with Orange last year," Forbes' president Alex Milsom said.

"Orange isn't too far and the kids want to play so we'll give them a game as best we can."

This year Forbes came even closer to playing under their own banner, but eventually made the call to once again play in the orange and black.

"We were very, very close to getting our own team," Milsom said.

"We actually did have enough players but we didn't have enough cover because we have a couple of kids who play multiple sports so there are some days where we miss a few through motorbikes or soccer or stuff like that.

"We couldn't guarantee that we'd have the numbers every week and we had a good relationship with the Tigers and they said by all means, come across."

Although the bulk of the Swamp Tigers will feature in the under 12s side, there will also be Forbes players in the 14s and possibly even the under 17s.

"Orange are happy to help us out. We're a smaller town and AFL is a minority sport but we are growing," Milsom said.

"If we didn't have that relationship with Orange, these kids would miss out."

So between now and May 1 when the junior season begins, Milsom will continue to train the Forbes kids on Friday evenings, keeping in touch the Orange coaches so that come gameday, they are all on the same page.

The first set of games will be at home against the Bathurst Bushrangers.

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