The council is now undertaking a 10-year Sport and Recreation Plan<\/a> for Zelman Cowen, following consultation with more than 400 community members. The park contains five sports fields covering roughly 47,500 square metres and caters for football, Australian rules football, baseball, cricket, athletics and ultimate frisbee.<\/p>\nCouncil acknowledges that the precinct is under increasing pressure and that its future planning needs to consider accessibility, safety, gender equity and universal design.<\/p>\n
But planning is not building.<\/p>\n
And a plan without funding is a very long way from a toilet that actually works.<\/p>\n
That is Hatzis\u2019 frustration.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re being constantly told that there\u2019s a plan to redevelop Zelman Cowen,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the problem is that there is no funding.\u201d<\/p>\n
His estimate is that Malvern City could be seven-to-ten years away from seeing meaningful redevelopment.<\/p>\n
Fair Access in policy, barriers in practice<\/p>\n
That is where the council\u2019s own rhetoric around women\u2019s sport becomes important.<\/p>\n
Stonnington\u2019s sports infrastructure planning recognises that many older sporting facilities were not designed for equitable participation by women and girls.<\/p>\n
That is not an abstract policy problem at Zelman Cowen.<\/p>\n
There are girls standing outside a toilet.<\/p>\n
There are parents being asked to intervene.<\/p>\n
And there are young players who, he fears, could eventually decide that the inconvenience isn\u2019t worth it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they\u2019re not willing to fund it, then how long can clubs fund it?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n
That is the question Stonnington needs to answer.<\/p>\n
Not because Malvern City should automatically jump to the front of the queue, but because the council needs to be able to explain why it has placed this particular queue in the order it has.<\/p>\n
The comparison with other sporting facilities is inevitably going to be uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Hatzis points to the state-of-the-art facilities available to some AFL and cricket clubs. He points to major investment at Toorak Park and the new Stonnington Sports Centre.<\/p>\n
His argument is that Malvern City would be prepared to meet council halfway.<\/p>\n
Malvern City is willing to meet council halfway<\/p>\n
The club would lobby state and federal governments. It would seek private funding. It would even ask its own support base to contribute.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d be happy to go and lobby the state and federal government to help us with the funding,\u201d Hatzis says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd even creating some private funding. I\u2019d be happy to get our support base to help with that also.\u201d<\/p>\n
That matters, because this isn\u2019t simply a demand that ratepayers write Malvern City\u2019s club a cheque.<\/p>\n
It is a demand for a pathway. Give us a plan. Give us a timeframe. Give us something to work towards.<\/p>\n
Instead, Hatzis says, the message from council has become increasingly difficult to accept.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe communication coming down the line that we don\u2019t have any funding is absolutely wearing thin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Football\u2019s missing support<\/p>\n
One of the more damning parts of our conversation wasn\u2019t even about the council.<\/p>\n
Hatzis says he has repeatedly contacted Football Victoria seeking support. He says he has been told someone would contact him to begin an engagement process and that Malvern City is an important part of the fabric of Victorian football.<\/p>\n
That call is yet to come, which raises an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps Malvern City\u2019s problem isn\u2019t just that it has failed to convince Stonnington; perhaps it\u2019s that football itself has historically been too willing to accept second-best facilities and making do.<\/p>\n
Football has grown enormously in the past 25 years, while girl\u2019s and women\u2019s football in particular has exploded across the past decade. Clubs are increasingly expected to provide pathways from junior participation to elite competition.<\/p>\n
Yet the infrastructure beneath that growth has not kept pace.<\/p>\n
A story bigger than one club<\/p>\n
That is where Stonnington\u2019s own Fair Access Policy becomes particularly difficult to reconcile with what is happening at Zelman Cowen.<\/p>\n
The council says the policy is designed to address \u201cknown barriers\u201d experienced by women and girls in accessing community sport facilities, before acknowledging in its budget that implementing Fair Access will require \u201csignificant new funding\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is a remarkable admission: the council recognises the barriers, recognises that its sporting infrastructure needs to change, yet the girls at Malvern City are still being asked to wait for the money to make that change happen.<\/p>\n
Malvern City\u2019s story is therefore bigger than one pavilion.<\/p>\n
It is about what happens when a sport grows faster than the facilities designed to accommodate it.<\/p>\n
And it is about whether councils can continue to promote female participation while asking girls to accept facilities that would be considered unacceptable in other parts of community life.<\/p>\n
Stonnington says it has limited resources.<\/p>\n
That is undoubtedly true.<\/p>\n
But scarcity does not remove the responsibility to explain the choices being made.<\/p>\n
If there is $600,000 available for one year\u2019s renewal and maintenance at a golf course, if millions are flowing through tennis, pavilion and sports-ground programs, and if a $49.9 million flagship sporting centre can be delivered, then telling Malvern City simply that there is \u201cno funding\u201d is not really an answer.<\/p>\n
It is only the beginning of the question.<\/p>\n
Why that facility?<\/p>\n
Why now?<\/p>\n
Why them?<\/p>\n
And why not Zelman Cowen?<\/p>\n
Malvern City has spent decades making do.<\/p>\n
Its president admits the club has not always been loud enough.<\/p>\n
But over the last decade, that has changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything right as a club,\u201d Hatzis says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to be heard\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps the real test for Stonnington now is not whether it can find enough money to fix every sporting facility in the municipality.<\/p>\n
It clearly cannot.<\/p>\n
The test is whether, when the council sits down to decide who waits another decade and who moves forward. Malvern City, a club with more than 800 players, a senior men\u2019s program that is among Victoria\u2019s elite, and a growing cohort of girls can make a convincing enough case to finally move up the list.<\/p>\n
Because asking girls to wait years for a proper place to change is not a particularly convincing way to build the future of women\u2019s sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Malvern City Football Club, the problem isn\u2019t finding girls who want to play football. It is finding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":928274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,495328,495329,596,495330,85],"class_list":["post-928273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-c-diploma","tag-female-coaches-experience","tag-football","tag-hayley-todd","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928273","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=928273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}