Box Hill United receives green light for $2.8 million facility upgrade project

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Box Hill United are set to benefit from a $2.8 million facility upgrade project at the club’s training base at Sparks Reserve, with works set to begin in September of this year.

The project will include the construction of a new satellite pavilion which will have four female-friendly changerooms, referee changerooms, a canteen, a first aid room, a storage room, public toilets and a covered external concourse for spectator viewing.

The Whitehorse City Council are funding the majority of the upgrades, with the state government tipping in $500,000 through the World Game Facilities Fund.

President of Box Hill United, George Petheriotis, welcomed the upgrades, which he explained had been in the works for the past few years.

“It was something we were working on with our council for many years,” he told Soccerscene.

“The club’s been around for almost 100 years and it’s never had appropriate facilities at Sparks Reserve. We’ve got a fantastic complex at Wembley Park across the road, but at Sparks Reserve (which is our training ground) we haven’t had the right facilities.

“The club has continued to grow over the years and we needed the facilities upgraded because it was too far for players of any age to walk over to Wembley Park to use amenities and so forth.

“Because of the growth of football and women’s football in the area, council got to a point where it acknowledged that the facilities needed to be updated, which was fantastic.”

With the female friendly changerooms a major part of the facility upgrades, Petheriotis explained how important it was for the club to have a true home for all types of football players.

“It’s of paramount importance. The club was really struggling to function without changerooms and attract players, especially female players,” he said.

“People don’t just want to roll up and train on a piece of land and go home, they want to go to a place where they want to be at and spend some time at. This includes the parents who come and drop off their kids, and want to hang around and have a look at training.

“Now, they’ll have that area to observe, purchase something from the canteen and so forth.”

The club, but also the local community, are set to be the big winners of the $2.8 million project.

“The benefits for the club include the good it will do for our players, who are very committed to their own football development,” Petheriotis stated.

“Being a premier NPL club for both men and women, they get access to warm changerooms, showers and places which are comfortable. We are finally getting a facility which makes the club feel like home, rather than just an open piece of land.

“In terms of the community, it cleans up the area. It makes it look more attractive and is safer, through pathways, driveways, parking, lighting and gardens, so it really makes the area look a lot nicer and more accessible.”

Alongside the upgrades project, which is set to be completed by June of next year, the club have recently received lighting upgrades at Wembley Park through council and state government funding, allowing the club to host night games.

The 200 LUX lighting upgrades came at a total cost of around $550,000.

Despite this, Box Hill are still looking for further necessary upgrades, which will look to take the club to the next level and move them towards an even brighter future.

“We are (looking for more upgrades). Along with the clubrooms that are being built now, I believe the final piece of the puzzle for Sparks Reserve is a hybrid synthetic surface,” Petheriotis said.

“We are not a club that is a summer or winter sport, we are an all-year soccer club that trains its players for 48 weeks of the year, so the hybrid surface is necessary. We have players from the age of four to seniors in both men and women, and they need a ground they can train on for the entire year.

“Unfortunately, as much as we all want grass, the grass doesn’t hold up for the whole year, so a hybrid synthetic is something that we need there to secure the club’s future as a premier development club.

“We want to keep kids off the street and play the game they love so they can aspire to be professionals. We know it’s very hard to achieve but we want to provide a place where people can strive to achieve their dreams.”

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Tasmania’s State Budget Commits $350,000 to Football Facility Planning as $80 million Home of Football Moves Closer to Reality

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Image Credit: Football Tasmania

The Tasmanian State Government has committed $350,000 in seed funding for the next stage of planning for Football Tasmania‘s proposed Home of Football, moving the state’s most significant football infrastructure project closer to construction and signalling political recognition that demand for rectangular facilities in Tasmania has outgrown what currently exists.

The funding, confirmed in the 2026-27 State Budget handed down last week, sits within an almost $200 million investment in sport and recreation across the budget and forward estimates: a package the government describes as designed to improve access and participation for Tasmanians of all ages. The football allocation is listed alongside a $25 million community sporting infrastructure commitment at Kingborough, $12.5 million for new multipurpose indoor sporting courts at New Town Bay, and $8 million for the Domain Tennis Centre redevelopment.

Football Tasmania CEO Tony Pignata OAM welcomed the commitment as an acknowledgement of the structural gap between participation numbers and available infrastructure, particularly in the state’s south.

“The State Government’s delivery on this commitment shows us that they understand that demand outstrips supply for rectangular facilities in the state,” Pignata said. “If we are to continue to grow and develop future Matildas and Socceroos, we need to invest in the infrastructure our game so desperately needs.”

The proposed $80 million facility would include six full-sized pitches, three synthetic and three turf, alongside four five-a-side pitches, modern changerooms for both men and women, and dedicated training facilities. The design is intended to serve every level of the game simultaneously, from grassroots junior competitions through to national-level tournaments.

From grassroots to A-League ambitions

Football Tasmania has framed the facility’s purpose across a deliberately wide range of uses. At the community end, it would provide a permanent home for junior games and regional tournaments that currently compete for limited rectangular ground availability across the state. At the elite end, it would create the capacity to host national competitions including the Emerging Matildas and Emerging Socceroos Championships, flagship state competitions such as the Statewide Cup finals, and potentially, in time, an A-League team.

That last ambition is the most significant and the most distant. Pignata was measured but direct in raising it, situating a Tasmanian A-League club alongside the NBL’s Jackjumpers, the WNBL’s Jewels and the AFL’s Devils as part of the state’s emerging identity as a home for national sporting competition.

“One day down the track, we anticipate this would become home to our very own A-League team, so that we take our rightful place in the nation’s elite competition,” he said.

The pathway from planning funding to A-League admission is long and would require sustained political and commercial support well beyond the current commitment. But the logic is consistent with how football infrastructure investment has worked elsewhere in Australia. The facility comes first, and the competitive pathway follows. Without a purpose-built ground that meets the standards required for elite competition, the conversation about an A-League team cannot begin in earnest.

The equity dimension

The inclusion of modern women’s and men’s changerooms in the facility’s design carries more weight than it might appear. Community and semi-professional football facilities across Australia have historically been built to male standards, with women’s changerooms added as afterthoughts or not included at all. That inadequacy has been consistently identified as a barrier to female participation and to the hosting of women’s competitions at venues that cannot accommodate them properly.

A purpose-built facility that treats women’s infrastructure as a design requirement rather than a retrofit positions the Home of Football to serve the growth of women’s football in Tasmania in a way that existing facilities cannot. The state recorded 41,395 registered football participants in 2025, a number that has been growing and that the current rectangular facility stock was not built to support at this scale.

Additionally, the government’s Ticket to Play program, which provides eligible children with two vouchers worth up to $100 each for sporting participation, and the Ticket to Wellbeing program offering $100 vouchers to eligible seniors, represent indirect but meaningful support for football participation across the state’s communities.

Pignata also acknowledged outgoing Football Tasmania President Bob Gordon, who he said had dedicated almost a decade to the organisation and had been instrumental in lobbying for this and other facilities across the state.

The $350,000 planning commitment is a beginning. The $80 million facility it is intended to progress remains subject to further government investment and development approval.

Football Victoria and VicHealth partner on anti-racism program as community sport data reveals systemic problem

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Football Victoria has partnered with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation to roll out the Set The Standard initiative across the state’s football clubs, in a collaboration that signals a significant shift in how Australia’s most popular club-based sport is approaching racism and cultural exclusion at the grassroots level.

The partnership brings together the state’s peak football governing body and its primary health promotion agency around a shared finding that can no longer be treated as incidental. According to the 2025 report Enhancing the Capacity of Victorian Community Sport to Tackle Racism, 56 per cent of surveyed participants had experienced or witnessed racism in community sport. In a state where football draws participants from some of the most culturally diverse communities in the country, that figure represents a systemic failure the sport can no longer address through conduct policies alone.

Clubs that subscribe to the Set The Standard newsletter will be entered into a draw to win one of three $1,000 vouchers, available for equipment, facility improvements, events or other community initiatives. The incentive is designed to drive early engagement with a program whose ambitions extend well beyond a newsletter subscription.

What the Partnership Signals

Racism in sport has historically been treated as a conduct and governance issue, managed through complaints mechanisms that require incidents to be formally reported and tend to significantly undercount the actual prevalence of harm. VicHealth’s framing of racism as a public health problem repositions the entire conversation.

Experiences of racism are associated with measurable negative health outcomes including anxiety, depression and social withdrawal. When community sport, which governments and health agencies actively promote as a vehicle for physical and mental wellbeing, becomes a source of those same harms, the public health cost is direct and quantifiable.

Resources, not Rhetoric

For Football Victoria, the partnership brings something the governing body cannot provide on its own. VicHealth’s credibility, resources and public health framework give the initiative a foundation that a sporting organisation working alone would struggle to establish. Set The Standard offers clubs practical tools and guidance built around progress rather than perfection, which reflects a realistic understanding of how cultural change works inside volunteer-run community organisations.

The $1,000 vouchers are not a side note. Most community clubs operate on tight margins, depend on volunteer administrators and are already stretched managing growing participation demands. Finding room to invest in cultural development programs on top of everything else is difficult. Providing tangible resources directly addresses that constraint at the point where clubs are most likely to disengage.

The program also arrives at a consequential moment. Football in Victoria is absorbing significant participation growth following the AFC Women’s Asian Cup and sustained increases in junior registrations, bringing new communities into the game in large numbers. The 2025 data suggests the environments those communities are entering are not consistently safe or welcoming. Participation growth and cultural safety work need to move together. A sport that grows larger without becoming more inclusive has not actually improved the experience of the people playing it.

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