Southern suburbs cricket clubs may no longer be on a sticky wicket after their local council agreed to go in to bat for them and increase its contribution to them.<\/p>\n
The Melville and Applecross cricket clubs had each asked the City of Melville to help pay to maintain their playing surfaces.<\/p>\n
Councillors voted 9-1 at their November 18 meeting to give the MCC $50,000 per year and the ACC $10,000 per year, each for three years.<\/p>\n
But it also wants Cricket WA to step up to the crease and look at how it can help local governments pay for the cost of maintaining turf wickets.<\/p>\n
Before the council\u2019s decision, the MCC was the only Premier Cricket club in the metropolitan area that did not receive support from its council for maintenance works.<\/p>\n
It has carried out maintenance works at Tompkins Park for two cricket pitches and practice training nets to meet the top level of district cricket competition requirements since 1995, but the city stopped contributing in 2005.<\/p>\n
MCC president Mark Herbert told an agenda briefing last month without the city\u2019s help, the club\u2019s sustainability was in doubt.<\/p>\n
It received a smaller bar rebate than other clubs and was unable to pay its staff the same rate, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur director of cricket, if he was working elsewhere, would be on $25-$30,000 a year; we\u2019re paying him five grand this year,\u201d Mr Herbert said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe rely on goodwill rather than paying our coaches their fair worth.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are barely breaking even given what we\u2019re actually doing at the moment. There\u2019s only so much you can actually squeeze out of a lemon, and we have squeezed a lemon as hard as we possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the city doesn\u2019t support this club to curate its turf, then who does?<\/p>\n
He said the club was unable to provide the facilities or environment other clubs and players took for granted as part of an elite sporting program because the City of Melville was an \u201canomaly\u201d in local government support.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Melville Cricket Club currently undertakes the broadacre mowing of the fields at both Tompkins 1 and 2 fields during summer and has received an allowance over the last three seasons, but not for many years before that,\u201d Mr Burton said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAdditionally, this work not only benefits the cricket club on match days, but the community utilising the facilities for the remainder of the week.\u201d<\/p>\n
ACC president Mark Hullett said the funding it was seeking was a \u201cdrop in the ocean\u201d compared with its costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur headquarters, which is Shirley Strickland Reserve, is run by an association, so we don\u2019t have carte blanche access to that facility to raise the money that we need to generate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are the home to about 450 local cricketers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re also the home to the WA blind and vision-impaired cricket team. They literally can\u2019t play on any other surface than turf because you can imagine synthetic pitches sometimes have a lip . . . it\u2019s a tripping hazard.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe funding will help expand our cricket program and the extra hours we can spend preparing the pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a written submission to the council, WA Cricket infrastructure and local government relations manager Brodie Green said both clubs were at risk of being unable to maintain their facilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cMelville Cricket Club . . . financial sustainability is increasingly challenged due to limited revenue streams and the absence of consistent dividends from the Tompkins Park Recreation and Community Association,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cApplecross Cricket Club similarly relies on volunteer labour and modest resources to maintain its turf wicket block.\u201d<\/p>\n
The council was told the average paid by other local governments to premier cricket clubs was about $80,000 a year.<\/p>\n
Cr Nicole Robins said over the past three years combined the city had given the Melville club just $45,000.<\/p>\n
However, she said she wanted Cricket WA to help pay for the cost of maintaining turf wickets as she did not think local governments should foot the bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the city doesn\u2019t support this club to curate its turf, then who does?\u201d Cr Robins said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess the answer would be then the players have to pay more.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just don\u2019t think that\u2019s a reasonable solution because then all that\u2019s going to happen is that the Melville Cricket Club is going to lose their players to other clubs because they can go and play at another club and pay less to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deputy mayor Matthew Woodall was against removing a condition that linked the city\u2019s contribution to how much money was generated at Tompkins Park.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t believe if. . . (it) is operating effectively that it\u2019s appropriate for ratepayers to continue to provide the same level of funding to the club,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe provide change rooms, we provide basic ovals and so on, but we\u2019re not in the business of funding premier sport or elite sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do agree that it\u2019s reasonable to provide support for the cricket club for an interim period but I do think that we need to limit that support to where it\u2019s really necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Cr Glynis Barber said the city should be proud of the club and it was money \u201cwell spent\u201d, supporting it to the same extent as other local governments would be an \u201cextreme cost\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cr Karen Wheatland said the funding was very small compared with the value returned from protecting a pathway to elite cricket, supporting gender equity, and sustaining a club that represented Melville \u201cwith pride\u201d.<\/p>\n
Healthy Melville manager Dean Burton told an agenda briefing taking over all turf wicket maintenance and mowing at Tompkins Park and Bert Jeffery Park would cost the city about $240,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Southern suburbs cricket clubs may no longer be on a sticky wicket after their local council agreed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,135,124827,44,46,84,8080,588,85,45],"class_list":["post-325494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-local-government","tag-melville","tag-news","tag-perth","tag-politics","tag-south","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-wa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}