An indoor community sports facility (we have called it a stadium for want of a better name) is urgently required to service the growing sporting, recreational and associated social needs in this community.

Although the information below is about one of the area’s largest community sporting groups, other community sports groups such as netball, volleyball and badminton also share this requirement.

Over the past five years, Collingwood Basketball Association has experienced its most significant growth since the association’s inception over thirty years ago.

Now with over 900 participants, innovative programs covering key and emerging community sectors, and a professional management organisation, the Association is successfully achieving many of its objectives and is well situated for further growth. And with the continued increase in population in the City of Yarra and neighbouring areas to the north, there is a larger and younger demographic seeking enjoyable ways of merging community involvement with physical well-being, so this expansion can only continue.

But it is now reaching the stage where growth will be forced to slow, and many of the demands for activities will not be met, because we are almost unique among Melbourne municipalities in not having an indoor sports stadium. Until now, the many activities of the Association are being carried out using facilities that are geographically widely dispersed within the City of Yarra, City of Melbourne and the City of Darebin, are small (mostly single-court) venues, some with courts not even full-sized, all with varied operational, security and hiring fees as dictated by the schools that mostly own them, and providing little sense of community for the many activities that we run.

And these facilities, shared as they often are with other sports and commercial users, are now stretched to capacity.

Demand continues to increase for the junior (age 5 to 20) basketball activities that we run, with waiting lists for many of them, and we are unable at all to accommodate the constant demand for adult competitions.