AFL Barwon Supports Netball Infrastructure Development
AFL Barwon is in unanimous support of the statement made by City of Greater Geelong Mayor Trent Sullivan on Friday December 8th that there is a clear need to urgently progress the development of additional netball infrastructure in the Region.
The AFL Barwon Strategic Plan outlines a key strategic pillar that has a focus to “strengthen, ignite and support participation opportunities across every aspect of football and netball, to ensure all competitions thrive and have inequitable opportunities addressed”.
Netball participation numbers over the past 10 years has increased from 3100 to over 5700 participants playing in all AFL Barwon competitions. The past 12 months alone has incurred a rise of 9.4% across all AFL Barwon competitions. Team numbers in all competitions has risen from 335 in 2013, to 705 in 2023. There has been a severe lack of infrastructure development or improvements over this time to support the growth in participation. The lack of facility support, and developments means some teams are on a training rotation roster.
This growth in our competition could have been significantly higher with some team entries being denied due to being at facility capacity. AFL Barwon has also not had the opportunity to expand on diversifying competitions offerings. The capacity issues also led to All Abilities competitions being administered outside of AFL Barwon governance.
The Barwon region has recorded increases in Netball participation each year since the Covid-19 pandemic. This is not only due to the competitions being provided, but also assisted by the strong growth corridors in the region. The population increase in the Greater Geelong region is projected to rise by over 63,000 by 2033, and by around 114,000 people in 2041. If our netball competitions increase by even 1% of the projected population growth over the next 10 years, we will have a projected increase of approximately 630 participants and roughly 63 teams.
The pathway and elite netball opportunities in the Barwon region are further significantly hampered with the lack of infrastructure development. The obvious lack of Stadia and surrounding infrastructure to support or showcase elite Netball such the Geelong Netball Club programs. This has also led to our own representative netball programs having no adequate facilities to train. The lack of appropriate Stadium has put our region well behind other Regional Victoria towns. Ballarat and Bendigo both have Indoor Stadiums with capacities of 3000 and 4000 respectively. There is a clear desire and requirement for Geelong to have a Stadium that matches or exceeds the capacity of these other regions considering the population size and projected growth.
The future of Netball in our community is being severely hampered by the lack of facility infrastructure growth to meet the exponential growth in the Barwon Region
We look forward to supporting any progressive conversations surrounding Netball infrastructure enhancements in the future to benefit our community.
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