Hawthorn’s Dingley project pushes past construction hold-ups, on target potential 2025 opening
Hawthorn president Andy Gowers is confident the club’s move to Dingley is finally on track after years of delays and hold-ups.
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Andy Gowers thinks he is standing in the swimming pool.
The Hawthorn president isn’t dripping wet or raving mad, as he looks out over a handful of huge tractors and trucks digging up turf from the top of a mound that will one day be the club’s crowning off-field achievement.
He would already be inside a completed club HQ if not for consistent delays brought on by Covid and the hangover of the site’s history as a tip, amid rumours of board disunity and losses of key staff.
From up here, well within the bounds of the long gestating future Hawthorn base in Dingley Village, Gowers can see it all.
The two-storey administration building, the training centre fit with recovery pool that he thinks marks the spot where he stands, the MCG-sized oval and the AFLW oval with grandstand where the female Hawks will play.
Even the statue of John Kennedy that now looks over the ground at Waverley will be packed up and delivered to Dingley, with the entire complex to be named the Kennedy Community Centre.
There is no grass in sight yet, just gravel, but the roads are marked out, lights poking out of the dirt and even the poles for nets behind the goals are up.
Gowers estimates the project is 14 per cent done and is hopeful the club will have shifted everything over by late 2025, opening the door for the club to play its AFLW games there that season.
But the trajectory of the $100 million project has never moved in a straight line and even those who helped push it along still doubt where it is headed.
Two former high-ranking club officials, told this masthead that they feared the project was being “undermanaged” and the club had “dropped the ball”.
The site sits on part of an old landfill – the EPA told this masthead Hawthorn had ticked off necessary environmental requirements and its parcel of the old tip is minor compared to neighbouring land – and Gowers conceded a clay cap put in took some time.
But he denied there has been any mismanagement.
Early indications from the club after it bought the land for $7 million in 2016 had an optimistic completion date of 2022 and 12 months ago, a well publicised contract with ADCO Constructions had hopes it would be finished by mid-2024.
Some within the club then expected it to be a decade-long project and that was before Covid put the brakes on construction jobs worldwide.
“We have faced a few very normal construction-type issues, for example making sure the local residents are comfortable and there are some environment things you need to tick off,” Gowers said.
“You can’t just begin a project of this size and what we are planning to do without that tick off. Things like gas and water, you need to make sure those things are ticked off and they have been.
“Now we have all the sign offs and approvals that we need and now we are ready to go.
“Construction has been difficult, construction costs have gone up. Getting material and labour has been challenging and we are ready to rock and roll so we are excited about that.”
Whispers of a split on the board have persisted during the build and former club president Jeff Kennett told this masthead: “I have always known there were one or two people who are not Dingley friendly” on the club’s board.
Again, Gowers batted away any talk of disunity.
“My experience has been that everybody has been committed to getting this place built and it has been a completely united view on that,” he said.
Highly respected administrator Kerrie Brewer steered the Dingley build before she was poached by Collingwood last year, with Kennett declaring that much of the project’s “institutional knowledge was with her”.
Club CEO for much of the Dingley project, Justin Reeves also left the club for personal reasons in May.
But the Hawks said there were plans in place to fill the gap left by Brewer and her departure didn’t hold the project up.
“There was succession planning in place but absolutely, Kerrie has done an amazing job on helping drive this project forward and we still miss her,” Gowers said.
“There was succession planning in place and we have been able to keep things rolling so that hasn’t caused a delay in any way.”
Much of the $100 million price tag was made up by shrewd sales of gaming venues to allow Hawthorn to own all of Dingley and Gowers said the price tag remained within an expected range.
The club believes it will stand alone in owning all of its training and administration facilities, allowing it to lease or sell unused land on the 28 hectare site.
The club also currently owns Waverley and will decide what to do with the ageing heritage-listed grandstand and oval once it moves out.
Despite the delays, Hawks figures old and new are united on the strength Dingley will provide once it is done.
It has often been labelled as a future-proofing exercise that could stabilise the club for 100 years.
“It is a generational project, it is a visionary project,” Kennett said.
“We will be the only club in the competition that owns its own land and facilities so in terms of setting you up, it is a great investment.”
Gowers labelled it as “transformative”.
“I think it sets us up to hopefully be, if not the, one of the powerhouses of the AFL,” he said.
“Because of that sense of pride and the flexibility it fives us, to have the men’s and women’s programs completely unified … to have everything integrated for the two programs is fantastic.”
FROM BOTTOM TO TOP
It only takes a short visit out to Waverley to understand the scope of change Hawthorn will go through when it moves all its boxes to the new site on the edge of the Dingley Bypass.
A relic of the VFL Park that used to sit there, Waverley’s facilities are old, boxed in by housing and parking is always bursting at the seams.
Veteran forward Chad Wingard openly admitted the club’s facilities rank near the bottom in the league.
It’s a far cry from the European soccer type plans that prompted Sam Mitchell, then a player, to quip in 2016 that Dingley could replicate English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur’s $123 million training base.
“I think you go from the bottom couple to the top couple (in the league) for sure but that is what happens when you have obviously been at a place for a long time,” Wingard said.
“The game has grown so much and this site makes it so much easier for when it does grow again, we have the ability to expand.”
The Hawks AFLW side played home games at Frankston this year and moving in to a homegrown base will streamline the club.
And defender Mackenzie Eardley said setting up a proper AFLW base would help fans connect with the team.
“Being able to know we have a home ground, and we do have that now at Frankston and the Frankston community is great at coming out and supporting us, but knowing this is our home ground and our place, it is going to create such a good space for us to build as a women’s program,” Eardley said.
“That home ground advantage will be great.”
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