The people of Maitland will have access to the triumphs, tribulations, history and heroes of more than a century of soccer in the Northern NSW, Sydney and South Coast areas when Maitland Mayor Peter Blackmore and Maitland City Library are presented with the comprehensive history prepared by the Northern NSW Football’s former historian, Harry Hetherington.

Mr Hetherington’s invaluable historic record has been converted to microfiche format and will be presented to Mayor Peter Blackmore and Maitland Council’s City Librarian, Keryl Collard, at 2pm, Thursday June 7th at Maitland City Library.

At 80 years of age, Mr Hetherington’s labour of love, which involved 22 years of painstaking research and countless hours hunched over an old, manual typewriter, resulted in 4000 typewritten pages meticulously documenting the history of soccer since its first appearance at Minmi in 1884 to the Northern NSW Soccer Federation’s governance in 1990.