Having two toilets to serve the women attending one of our local sporting fields and as the change facilities for an entire women's rugby team is pretty poor form.
That's not a criticism of the club or council. It's a situation that is replicated all across the state as the number of girls and women participating in traditionally male-dominated sports booms, but the facilities to accommodate them cannot keep up.
I was pleased to read in Saturday's Newcastle Herald about the Football NSW and Northern NSW Football Better Facilities, Connected Communities infrastructure and local facilities strategies, developed after a statewide audit found that 80 per cent of football facilities didn't have cubicles for showers, while 20 per cent had no change rooms at all.
This is particularly problematic as female participation in the sport grows, which Northern NSW alone says has seen a 58 per cent increase in their zone since 2014 (in the interests of transparency, both my daughters form a part of that figure).
But football is not alone.
In 2015 Sport Australia commenced the AusPlay survey, the largest and most comprehensive survey of its kind ever conducted in Australia, to inform future national strategies. Its findings have shown that the female sports boom we are seeing in the Hunter is being replicated right across the country.
AusPlay found that in 2019 there were almost 122,000 more women and girls playing AFL, football, rugby league and/or rugby union nationwide than there were in 2016. AFL accounted for more than half this number, registering a growth of 65,000 additional female participants in those years.
While there's no doubt that much of this growth can be attributed to the increasing visibility of professional and semi-professional sportswomen through a new, and long overdue, focus on the development and marketing of national women's leagues in these codes (such as the AFLW and the NRL Women's Premiership), it's simply out of the financial reach of the majority of grassroots clubs to keep up with this need for additional space and facilities no matter how many sausages they sizzle.
As I move around Newcastle I hear the stories from our sports clubs about a lack of appropriate facilities and many of them end the same way, with women being left to get changed in the car park or entire teams waiting in a queue with spectators because they only have a couple of toilets. When women need to duck down in a car to change a bra, that doesn't even meet the bare minimum of what is acceptable.
I hear the stories from our sports clubs about a lack of appropriate facilities and many of them end the same way ... When women need to duck down in a car to change a bra, that doesn't even meet the bare minimum of what is acceptable.
But this problem cannot be left to clubs and councils alone. This is where the NSW government needs to step up. Using the Active Kids vouchers to get young people into sport is one thing, but giving sports clubs the support to keep young people there is another.
In last month's budget a new statewide sporting infrastructure fund was announced worth $100 million. On the one hand, it is a downgrade from what was previously available - $200 million split into regional and Greater Sydney funds - but on the other hand it is $100 million more than Newcastle has previously been able to access. Until now, Newcastle and Wollongong have been the only two local government areas out of the state's 128 that were unable to access this funding due to the lack of consistent classification of the cities as being either regional or metropolitan. This was a sticking point that both I and Member for Wollongong Paul Scully took to the grants inquiry that's currently being conducted in the NSW Parliament, when we appeared before the committee in November.
While Paul and I have both been fighting for some time to have both our cities become eligible for a major sports infrastructure fund and we're thrilled the effort has paid off, really, it should never have been this way.
When cities are deliberately excluded from grant programs like this it's not the people at the top it hurts. It's the volunteers behind the barbecue trying to raise that money for an upgrade. It's the women in cars getting changed under a towel, or it's the kids all trying to use the loo before the game starts.
All we were ever asking for is what everyone else had, and it's the same for female change facilities.
While selling sausage sandwiches is great, NSW government assistance to provide equitable facilities is even better.
