Basketballers in Melbourne’s west step up fight for a new stadium

It’s 5pm on a Thursday and excited children are getting out of a queue of cars outside a basketball stadium in Melbourne’s west.

After their parents drop them off, they rush inside, past a rickety outdoor patio, a large, red-letter “reception” booth from the ’90s, and dirty bathrooms (the men’s room tonight is splattered with fresh blood).

Glass doors open directly onto the gym’s slippery floor, while parents sit on steep, precarious bleachers and long metal benches. This is the West’s “show court” at RecWest Braybrook, and the Westgate Basketball Association says these kids are the lucky ones.

They weren’t turned away or ended up on the long waiting lists others endured.

“The biggest disappointment and limitation in our involvement is the facilities,” says Llewellyn Rees, vice president of the association. “Training programs were prepared, game programs were prepared until late at night.”

Chairman Glenn Casement points to a piece of plywood blocking a crack in the stadium wall. “Our kids deserve a better experience in their home stadium.”

The long-running and fraught battle for a new stadium in Melbourne’s west is expected to escalate on Monday night when the association demands Maribyrnong Council “put their money where their mouth is” and commit to funding the project at a meeting on the council’s draft budget.

The council has backed a plan to build a new $60 million six-court indoor sports stadium in Yarraville for three years. Upgrades to McIvor Reserve.

But the association says it is running out of patience and time, and that only a formal budget commitment and allocation of money tied to state and federal funding will be sufficient.

“We were waiting for all the goodwill and promises to clear up,” says Rees.

Maribyrnong Council has allocated $2.5 million towards the design of the stadium and is lobbying the Victorian and federal governments to primarily build the Stadium at McIvor Reserve. A proposal co-signed by Labor MPs Katie Hall and Melissa Horne was rejected in the last state budget.

“We recognize there is a chronic shortage of indoor sports facilities in Melbourne’s inner west, which is placing significant pressure on community access, participation and local sports clubs,” Maribyrnong Mayor Mohamed Semra said.

However, we cannot meet the demand for the stadium alone.”

Maribyrnong needs 12 more courts to meet local demand, according to a 2018 report report commissioned by the council. However, the association claims that this number will grow immediately, with more than 200 players on waiting lists and hundreds more waiting in the reserves.

another one Two courts at RecWest FootscrayThe project, which is planned to be completed in December 2027, will hardly affect the current demand.

On paper there are 17 indoor courts at Maribyrnong, but realistically only eight are accessible for domestic competitions due to their mixed use and private ownership.

The association claims four of those eight are at RecWest Braybrook, which is in decay. These courts were already at 93 per cent of weekend capacity in 2018 and the association is asking the council to fund an urgent upgrade.

Tam Bower said her 12-year-old son recently broke his arm because he caught his leg on padded netball rings affixed to the court’s wall instead of moving it away from the wall.

“We love this club and community and want it to be a safe place for everyone,” Bower says.

Some in the community, led by the Friends of McIvor Reserve, are strongly opposed to the park proposal. They say the stadium should not be built at the expense of green space two blocks from Yarraville West Primary School.

The group instead wants the state government to purchase a “legacy” site where they can build the stadium.

“Unfortunately, the council and state government are giving developers a higher commercial value for land that could be sold to fill their coffers, rather than reserving it for community amenity,” said the group’s spokesman, Miles Parnall-Gilbert.

At RecWest in Braybrook, parents stretch uncomfortably on the dusty bleachers while sitting on their phones. When the association presidents remembered that there was a gap between the ground and the field wall and that some parents had to find their fallen phones, they almost had to shout because of the sound of children filling the courts.

Despite all this disappointment, the children’s eyes shine; They are running, dribbling, yelling at their friends on the other side of the field.

For now, they are still the lucky ones.

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