For many families, the weekend is not complete without a trip to their local sporting grounds for a game of footy or netball.
Sporting facilities are one of the most beloved pieces of community infrastructure, but juggling the needs of various community stakeholders with the facilities available can create headaches for councils.
Palerang Council project engineer Brendan Belcher opened the discussion on IPWEA’s Ask Your Mates forum with a question on rates of sport field provisions.
He asked:
“(Does) anybody have any documents they can refer me to that have benchmarks for the appropriate number of sports fields for a given population? We're going through a process of reviewing our sports fields (we don't have enough) and were after some benchmarks to use.”
Architect of the Yardstick project, World Urban Parks Asia Pacific chairperson and Xyst director Chris Rutherford says councils should perform a thorough assessment of existing facilities and their uses before acquiring more sport fields.
“The wise approach for councils that are experiencing growth is to complete a parks strategy, identifying what they’re got and where it is and what they need going forward,” he says.
“Councils should look at what they actually have got and what they have allocated and look at the actual usage hours and numbers.
“I would almost say creating more facilities is the last option.
“I think councils need to be very sure they’ve got their existing assets being appropriately well-used, instead of acquiring more as a first option.”
With weekends traditionally peak time for team sports, Rutherford suggests spreading games across the week could create more availability.
He also suggests looking at how the allocations of sports fields are made.
“One of the issues councils have got to address is that while there may be a perception there’s not enough sport fields, there may not actually be (a shortage) if they were to play their sport across the week or look at appropriately allocating sports fields based on use and need not just on historical norms - that’s a challenge,” Rutherford says.
Rutherford says councils also need to be aware of the actual and projected needs of the community, versus the “historical” needs.
“Usually there’s this tension between historical allocation of sport fields against what actual needs are - that’s a challenge for every council,” he says.
With each council’s demographics differing greatly, Rutherford says it is not a case of one size fits all for sport field provision.
“In Australia you have some pockets where you’ve had fairly recent migrations, and those cultures bring with them a preference for certain sports,” he says.
“These may be quite different from the traditional major users, especially of winter sports fields.”
Taking into account whether a population was ageing, the wear-and-tear on surfaces and the growth and decline of different sports is also important, Rutherford says.
“What we’ve seen over the last three decades is that for team sports, the dynamics have changed, the numbers have changed,” he says.
“In New Zealand for example the most played winter team sport is soccer although the perception is likely to be that rugby is the biggest sport.
“The other significant change that has happened in sport fields is the move of hockey being played on grass to being played on synthetic surfaces. Hockey along with netball have demonstrated how winter team sports can be played at varying times on varying days successfully while also growing their sports.
“Where they’ve developed a hockey centre, it frees up a lot of grass fields for other sports codes.”
Rutherford says completing a thorough parks strategy that investigated projected usages would allow councils to benchmark themselves against other areas.
The IPWEA Yardstick project provides the means to do just this, in addition to providing guidelines to survey parks and sports field users to identify their expectations and levels of satisfaction with current parks and sports fields.
Yardstick is a suite of benchmarking tools for parks, facilities and roads, which is owned and operated by a collaborative partnership of industry organisations including IPWEA.