Inner West Council: Two new all-weather sporting grounds approved for Callum Park

In a bid to help grow and save local sport across the Inner West, council has approved two brand new parks in the heart of the community. See the details here.

A Sydney council will invest millions into new state of the art sporting facilities with hopes to mitigate the issue of young people being turned away from the “health and social benefits of sport” due to lack of infrastructure.

Inner West Council has approved two all-weather sporting grounds in Callan Park as growing pressure to accommodate local sports increases with football clubs reporting they don’t have enough space.

The $8 million project will be designed similar to Lambert Park in Dulwich Hill – also an all-weather ground.

Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne said Lambert Park went “gangbusters” and helped grow sporting participation in the community.

Mayor Darcy Byrne.

“You look at Lambert that we put up 10 years ago and the ground has been going gangbusters ever since and enabled clubs to really expand their girls and women's program,” he said.

“They’ve got several Matildas who’ve come through the program playing on that field.

“Callan Park is home grounds of Balmain District Football Club, which is the largest junior football club in Australia so it was an overwhelmingly consensus to build the park here.”

The all-weather ground at Lambert Park.

Mr Byrne said the all-weather design was about using grounds in a very “dense” community where open grounds “don’t come along very often”.

“We have to look at how we can get greater utilisation out of the fields that we do have,” he said.

“We know that all weather surfaces mean that you don’t have to cancel during the rain, which has been a big problem this year as lots of kids have missed more than half their season because of it.

“There’s been an influx of women and girls into a local sport, which is a great thing, but the football clubs in particular are reporting that they just don’t have enough space.”

While some Greens and independent councillors voted against the proposal, Mr Byrne said more than 1400 locals signed an online petition supporting the new facilities.

He said he was happy to listen to the “1000s of parents” backing it then “out of touch” councillors.

The park will be funded by a $20m grant from the NSW Government.