Club members came together to operate jumping castles, run face-painting booths, and sell pink balloons and cupcakes to raise money for the foundation, and finished the weekend with a $12,031.10 donation.

While the fundraising drive began as a simple idea from the all-age womens team looking to support their coach’s wife, club registrar Mel Larson explained it became “so much more”.

“The girls came to me after they heard the news about their coach and they asked if they could wear these pink socks in their Women’s Premier League game to show their support,” Ms Larson said.

“We sort of got an idea that we could do a bit more than that, and when a few other people in the club revealed they had survived breast cancer we knew we had to do as much as we could.”

From there, every team in the Valentine club pulled on their pink-adorned socks, sporting the universal colour of support for breast cancer. The pink-drive finished on Monday evening with the all-age womens’ game – a fitting end, Ms Larson added, considering they had sparked the idea.

“We sold so much merchandise, and there was so many generous acts across the entire weekend, it was amazing,” she said.

“I had one elderly gentleman come up and hand over $100 note for the tin, and most of the under 17 team came over and made donations too – they could have grabbed raffle tickets but they just wanted to give, they weren’t worried about prizes or anything like that.

“So many wonderful stories came out of the weekend, and I am so proud of the entire club that we came together for a beautiful cause. We do a lot of things like this, like gala days and events, but we’ve never, ever had a reception like this. It was simply amazing.”

In the end, 818 pink socks were sold by the club across the four-day event.

Ms Larson also explained the club-wide fundraiser wouldn’t have been possible without the support of many of the local businesses that came on board “the moment they heard”.

As well as Silly Street Facepainting and ABC Jumping Castles, who supplied face-painting and equipment, and Adam’s Family Meats supplying the barbeque meats, Italk Travel and Cruise Warner’s Bay, Blooms Chemist at Belmont, Smartview Building, Care for You Services, Officeworks and Aldi all contributed to the weekend event.

“It was so amazing to have all these local businesses jump at the opportunity to support our cause,” Ms Larson said. “It really gave it a community flavour, and it meant that we could do so much more across the weekend than we had thought we could when we first started out.”

Donations of any amount for the Hunter Breast Cancer Foundation can be made online at hbcf.org.au/donations.