By Gabriella Payne
After years of tireless campaigning, members of the Officer Tennis Club are hopeful that their facilities might finally be in store for some long-overdue upgrades, making the growing club accessible to one and all.
On Thursday 27 January, the ALP’s 2022 federal election candidate for the seat of La Trobe, Abhimanyu (Abi) Kumar visited Officer along with Ballarat MP and Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development, Catherine King.
In an exciting announcement, the pair promised $736,000 in funding for the Officer Tennis Club and Toomuc Reserve Pavilion should Labor win the upcoming election – a welcome bit of good news for the local sporting club.
The club’s president, Michelle Pitcher, said that for the small group of dedicated volunteers who had “worked so hard“ for these upgrades, this announcement was music to their ears and they hoped to see the club transformed in the coming years.
“We’ve been working really hard for the last four years to upgrade our facilities – we’ve got a goal to make our club available for everybody and be an inclusive space,“ Ms Pitcher said.
“Accessibility is a big part of that and also getting women and girls into tennis.
“We haven’t been able to achieve that goal without funding like this, because we need to overhaul our facilities by getting our club house up to scratch, the courts and change rooms… so this funding announcement is very exciting, because we feel a bit of relief that our hard work is starting to pay off,“ she said.
Ms Pitcher said that since 2018, the club had been campaigning for upgrades and constantly applied for grant after grant, so it was fantastic to think that their calls for help had finally been heard.
“It’s tiring work, we only have a limited pool of volunteers that work on our committee and we all have jobs and families, but we want the best for our club,“ she explained.
“This is a booming area, so it’s frustrating that funding hasn’t been put into our club yet, as we have tripled in usage [in recent years], but we need more courts and better facilities,“ she said, adding that a number of senior female players had left due to the inadequate facilities.
The Officer Tennis Club hope to drastically improve the female change rooms at the club if the promised funding eventuates, as well as hopefully starting up a wheelchair tennis program and making the facilities accessible for people of all cultures and abilities within the community.
“We are so determined to have this happen,“ Ms Pitcher said.
“Our vision and goal is to have tennis inclusive for everyone and we need help achieving that.
“We can’t do it on our own, so that’s why this announcement is so exciting for us, because it feels like someone has listened,“ she said.
Ms Pitcher said that the club “would love to see a dedicated pledge from the other side of politics as well“ to help them achieve their goal.
