Sport brings people together, it teaches kids key life skills, it keeps youth out of trouble, brings families together and it keeps elderly active and healthy. For the Wainuiomata Sportsville board, the Wainuiomata Sports Hub means a lot more than just a building and some fields. For us, the Sports Hub is a medium for Sports, which in turn is a medium for growing and sustaining a healthy, resilient and sustainable community. For us, the dream is to create a facility that helps us in growing capability in people, families and our community.

Wainuiomata has a long and strong history of sporting successes. Many of our locals have represented NZ on International stage and many more have represented their city or their region on the national stage. They have done the community proud, this city proud and this country proud. We need to ensure that our young people, and our babies still in their nappies, have decent and modern facilities to use so that they too can rise to their abilities and make a name for themselves and keep the Wainuiomata flag flying.

It’s also a way to ensure our member sport codes can sustain their membership over the long term by pooling resources and creating shared capability. Club committees are struggling, volunteers are becoming scarce. We need a strategy to ensure all our sports are available to our community into the future.

Late last week, the Hutt City Council decided to fund the Wainuiomata Sportsville Sports Hub to the tune of $4.8M over the next 3 years in the Capital Plan. The immediate funding available for the next year (July 2017 – June 2018) is for the Wainuiomata Sportsville board, the various member sports clubs and the council officers to work and agree on the detailed business plan including the day-to-day operations plan and the funding plan for the balance $2.1M. This is not about clubs contributing funds but how we as a board will work with the community, clubs and Communities Facilities Trust to raise the balance.

This is a great news for Wainuiomata and something that we want the whole community to rally behind. The council has prioritised this investment for Wainuiomata because the officers and the councillors believed in our needs, they agreed with the concept and they have responded to how the community feels about its deteriorating sports facilities. The board sincerely thanks the officers and the councillors for their understanding and committing to our community.

The Sportsville board has been stating for months that the process of turning this dream into a reality is a multi-step process and it requires our member clubs and the wider community to come together and shape the details with us. The council’s decision and its rationale for the decision clearly supports the board’s position on this.

The council’s decision is not just for today – it is for our future too. It will shape the sporting lives of our kids and grand-kids and thus the community for the next few decades.

Come join us in taking the next step in this journey and making this dream a reality.

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