In the Scrum Since Day One: Neumann Group and the Alleygators

Every great club has an origin story, and the Alleygators' is a good one. Back in 1979, a bunch of locals decided Palm Beach and Currumbin needed a rugby club of its own, minus one small detail: a home ground. As the story goes, the fledgling side made do wherever they could find a patch of grass, with Salk Oval lending a hand and the Palm Beach Pub serving as the closest thing to a clubhouse.

A few years on, the Neumann Group was carving out Currumbin Park Estate just up the road. Nearby, behind what would become the Currumbin Fair Shopping Centre on Bienvenue Drive, sat a stretch of land nobody wanted: swampy, boggy, and about as far from a rugby pitch as you could get. It might work as playing fields, the council figured, if only someone could fix the "swamp" part.

Enter Neumann's. The club asked for a few truckloads of sand to help reclaim the site. According to club legend, that request turned into truck after truck rolling in for days on end. Whatever the real number, the sand did its job, and the Alleygators finally had a home to call their own.

Grounds are one thing; you still need goalposts. When Neumann's was asked to fabricate a set, the story goes that Peter Neumann decided modest wouldn't do. If the Alleygators were getting posts, they were getting the tallest posts around, a claim the club proudly wore for years. There's just one hitch in the legend: when the team enquired about the second set, Peter reportedly asked, "Two goalposts? Can't they just all kick to the one end?" Turned out he'd only built one! A second set arrived shortly after.

That same spirit of quietly showing up and doing more than asked has carried through to today. More recently, Neumann Group sponsored and built the club's new Junior Canteen, giving the next generation of Alleygators a proper game-day hub, unveiled at a club Sponsors Day where the Neumann team was thanked for everything from that first load of sand to the newest slab of concrete.

It's fitting that "In the Scrum Since Day One" has become shorthand around the club, because in Neumann's case, it's not just a slogan — it's the truth. From reclaiming swampland to raising goalposts to building canteens, the partnership has always been about turning up and getting stuck in.

Today, that same hands-on capability is put to work well beyond the Alleygators' home ground, as the Neumann Group helps build infrastructure in Queensland and beyond. Amongst many other capabilities, the group is a critical minerals producer, a reinforcing steel manufacturer, and a TMR-certified structural steel fabricator with over 60 years' experience, delivering bridge steelwork, traffic infrastructure, marine fabrication, and custom architectural metalwork across Australia. The tools have changed and the projects have gotten bigger, but the approach hasn't: solve the problem, build it properly, and stick around.

Here's to the next few decades in the scrum together.