Quote Originally Posted by The Magician View Post
That document is already completely irrelevant and obsolete. NCC have documents supporting the fact that a vast majority of the current fields in its care are under-utilised. There will be no development of football fields unless individual clubs push the barrow, chase the finances, and do the lobbying. All NCC will do is supply a "letter of Support", all funding must come from state or federal sources, then charge the club a DA fee to upgrade improve their own asset, then notify the club that works must be carried out by their "inducted" contractors, adding 40% to the project cost. Just ask Olympic.

Clubs have been promised facility upgrades since Noah's ark finally ran aground. I know of a community club that were finally "guaranteed" to have an extra 2 lights placed on an existing pole for the start of the 2022 season to expand their training area, previously budgeted and committed in 2019, 2020, and 2021 only to have correspondence 2 weeks before the due date of 2022 commencement asking to now pay for the 2 light fittings ($7000) and essentially council "will install". Using current advertised rates, those 2 lights would have added $1300 to their yearly fee bill.

Thought for the day... with our fields so wet during the year that council have not been able to mow, mark, put goals up etc... what have those council parks workers been doing all year?
That document is only as irrelevant and obsolete as people allow it to be. It’s the most recent Council-commissioned report on sports ground in the LGA available and Council are failing to implement the recommendations. Who’s asking them to implement? Who’s pushing for the upgrades?

The answer is no one.

You are 100% right to highlight all the issues you have Magician but those won’t change unless we as a football community hold Council to account. The very first thing we should do is push for those recommendations to be implemented or at least investigated further.

The problem we as a soccer community have always had is that we are always competing with each other. Opportunities arise for clubs to share grounds with upgrades promised, but flags and rivalries and “I’m not sharing with them” BS steps in and stops it.

The quicker we realise we are the lowest priority and work together the better. How much stronger are we if we all work together and go to Council, our councillors and MPs as one and say ‘we want change and we’ll work together to get it’? That, and having the highest participation rates of any sport by some margin, is what makes the change. But we’ve got to leave the tribalism at the door.