Sibson, who played for Horsham United before the club’s merger with Natimuk, joins the Rams after four years at Dimboola.

He will be joining his former St Arnaud team-mate Simon Brearley as co-coach.

“I’ve known him since he was a kid at St Arnaud and I played there with him for 10 years,” Brearley said.

“We approached him last year and he was keen to stay on board with Dimboola but this year everything fell into place.”

The addition of Sibson will provide the Rams with much needed height on the field and plenty of experience off it.

“We want stronger leadership at the club on the playing field,” Sibson said.

“Nigel will definitely help to address that. He has good leadership credentials.

“He is about six-foot-two so we like his height too. He will bring quite a bit of versatility and can play in the midfield, up forward or down back.

“Recently he has played under some really good coaches and will bring in ideas from those guys.”

The Rams think they are slowly building a competitive side which will win more games in 2016.

A solid start and a strong finish came either side of a horrible few weeks during the middle of 2015.

This included a number of big losses for the young side.

“Obviously our aim is to get off the bottom, we made a few sacrifices last year to improve things at the club and that cost us some games at times,” Brearley said.

“But we don’t think we were that far away, we were competitive against Stawell and Harrow-Balmoral towards the end of the season, even though we only won two games.

“Getting some strong leadership and experience around the side, because we have a lot of young kids, it will go along way.

“We lack some targets up forward but we are working reasonably hard to address it. Our young kids will be a year older and will have enjoyed some more senior footy.”