Fish Creek to build temporary facilities as rebuild starts on clubrooms after fire destroys old one
After fire destroyed its clubrooms earlier this month, Fish Creek is moving ahead in its road to recovery. Here’s an insight into the club’s plans to ensure they’ll be ready for the first game of 2024.
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Fish Creek Football Netball Club says it could take years to rebuild new clubrooms to replace the historic facility lost in the fire earlier this month.
The club is now scrambling to make sure it has facilities available to allow them to play home games in the Mid Gippsland Football Netball League next year.
The reigning premiers are still counting the costs of the deliberately lit fire which destroyed its clubrooms on November 4.
The club recently tore down the damaged building, leaving behind just memories of what was the home of one of country footy’s most successful clubs.
Club president Ray Stefani said the immediate focus had been on getting some sort of facilities for the club to play in.
A move away from their home ground at John Terrill Memorial Park was not an option.
Neither was getting an AFL temporary facility similar to those the Shepparton Swans are currently in after floods ravaged their clubrooms last year.
“We’ve had several meetings with AFL representatives and that’s not an option for us,” Stefani said.
“The AFL have only one set of temporary buildings that Shepparton Swans are using at the moment and we spoke to the Shepp Swans president to get some more information about that.
“But that won’t be an option for us but they have offered help in some way with cost the of temporary amenities.
“But it is not in their scope to provide us what they provided for Shepparton.”
The two options left for Fish Creek are to lease facilities or build their own.
“We’ve looked at hiring or leasing temporary facilities but that’s extremely expensive, to the value of $100,000 per year for two change rooms and a shower block,” Stefani said.
“The club can’t afford to be paying that fee on top of running the day to day runnings. Our insurance also doesn’t cover that.
“So we’re looking at purchasing a transportable container and setting it up as shower and toilet amenities.
“Another option is building a shed on a specific site at the ground and for it be utilised as temporary change rooms.
“When we are finished with it, it could possibly come down and be sold off.”
But building a shed will require council approval, which means the club is trying its hardest to get everything finalised as quickly as possible to have facilities available by early next year.
“We are pushing hard at the moment because we want to get things locked away before Christmas,” Stefani said.
“We’re stressing to our local council we need some speedy approvals to get things ordered and on site ready to go.
“We’re hoping to have those facilities operational sometime in early February.”
Stefani concedes the temporary facilities would have not mattered if the club didn’t secure a social venue for next year.
But another sporting club has come to the rescue with the Fish Creek Bowls Club providing support.
“They are a fantastic support for the club and they have said they’ll do what they can to help us,” Stefani said.
“We’re hoping we’ll be able to share their facility to use as our social rooms.
“That’s a big positive because if that wasn't available I don’t know what we’d do as far as a social venue goes for our Thursday night dinners and then our after home games on Saturday.
“That’s a big part of the club and how it operates.
“It’s what builds the community part of the club.”
As for the rebuild of new facilities, Stefani revealed some work has been done with a structural engineer to assess what the old building would cost in today’s market for insurance purposes.
The club has set up a GoFundme page and an Australian Sports Foundation page to raise funds for the project.
More than $130,000 has been raised but the club is going to need a lot more.
“Numbers have been floated of around $3m (to rebuild privately),” Stefani said.
“We’ve been advised if we go for funding/grants through either local government or state government, then it becomes more complicated.
“Any project like that, once government money gets involved, it goes out to tender and it becomes only a government contractor who can build the project.
“A $3m bill done privately could be $4.5m once you get the government involved.”
“It could also take anywhere between two to five years depending on what we are looking at building and where we look at building it.
“We’ll deal with that in due course.”
Fish Creek has met up with both the state and federal ministers for the local area.
“They are on board with us, they’ve had discussions with the relevant ministers about our plight,” Stefani said.
“We are hopeful they will be able to help when the time comes with grant applications.”
Stefani said while the whole ordeal has been tough on the club but the resolve couldn’t be higher to ensure the Kangaroos survive.
“We’re all trying to keep our focus on the future now and reassuring all our players and members we are not going anywhere,” he said.
“We’ll be there bigger and better next year just we won’t have a social rooms and a different change room setup.”
Pre-season training for the club is set to start next week.
You can donate to the club and the rebuilding of their clubrooms here.
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