Death of Community Sport

One thing I’ve aimed to do is to make more time for friends, not just when I need friends but also when it sounds like they need it too. Sometimes it can be a vent about life’s frustrations or to switch off and have a conversation that isn’t related to work.

During one of my regular activities with a mate involving a few cheap pints on a Thursday evening, we drifted into our usual conversation on a passionate topic. The game of cricket. But before I bore you like a mid 90’s 5-day test match. Hang around and read on.

We both have a love for the game of Cricket, it’s a gentlemen’s game that requires patience and also timing. It also requires a large space to be played. Recently I’ve been working on a proposal with the council of where my cricket team resides about making use of their space and getting a second cricket pitch installed. After much lengthy discussion on the who, what, where and when. The conversation drifted into the use of community spaces.

Given he works in property, he’s noticed that a lot of new housing developments are designed to fit as many houses in one space. Tightly packed like sardines in a tin. Rack em and stack em, but with not a lot available other than a local shopping centre and closely located small park.

Part of Australians culture is their love for sport from a small age, and we have a tendency to take the land we have for granted by building out and not up. Children will take interest in footy and cricket and want to be like their heroes. But now with recent developments packing as many houses in to get as much money as they can, they’ve neglected to have any shared community space for sports. This means as the population grows, the demand for already existing clubs will grow. I know for a fact the association that runs our cricket competition already struggles to find enough grounds and we’ve seen some turned into synthetic soccer pitches. There isn’t much left for the good old fashioned game of cricket played on turf or concrete pitches across a vast space of real grass.

If more and more developments are going to take place with a lack of open space for any local community sport, are we going to see it die out? Not only will we see sports players become scarce, we will see an incline in obesity and lack of outside activities for communities. Which is why I also think we have to protect the large open community spaces we do have, make use of them and do everything to keep them. We are currently seeing this with the surrounding areas of Glenside Hospital. A positive that it creates jobs and housing close to the city which is what people want, but we sacrifice the open space that was used by the community and also a lot of the trees in the area. Unfortunately, we are never going to end up in a perfect or reasonable world. Given most of these types of developments are run through the wheeling and dealing of the government and large companies that can line their pockets, we won’t see any extra trees planted for the ones they cut down, or spaces created for sporting. Just small community parks, Glenside is an exception given that it’s so close to the surrounding parklands of Adelaide.

No one wants a death of community sport, but it’s creeping up on us.

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