NORTH Ballarat City’s prize recruit Nathan Saunders will not play at the club this year.Saunders has accepted a mining job in Western Australia, meaning he will not play for the Ballarat Football League club at all.Club president Stephen Darbin confirmed that Saunders would not pull on the black and white, saying both he and the club were disappointed that he would not be playing.The VFL veteran was touted as a star recruit when the club signed him in November last year after he was lured across from Geelong West-Saint Peters in the Geelong Football League.He said at the time that 2012 was definitely going to be his last year of football, in that he wanted one final chance to win his first premiership in more than 20 years of football.However, the job offer was said to be good to refuse.“He’s very disappointed not to be coming to the club, but he went with our blessing,” said Darbin.“He has got to put his career first. At the age of 35 he’s got to start looking after his future which is more important than one year of football.”Saunders played 63 games for the North Ballarat Roosters between 2003 and 2006, in a VFL career that spanned over 186 senior VFL games.He had planned to be an assistant coach at Peach’s North City.Darbin said although the spearhead was a big loss, he felt the team would be able to fill the void.However, he did not rule out trying to find a replacement.“We will continue to look around but we know it is fairly late in the piece,” said Darbin. “We still have three tall forwards in Mick Williams, Ryan Hobbs and Aaron Clark up forward so we feel we should be all right there.”Saunders was unable to be contacted yesterday.