afl afl
Shinboners
Ardenup
While the new-look Blundstone Arena in Hobart will be in top nick for the club’s two AFL fixtures there in 2013, North Melbourne’s spiritual home of Arden St also underwent a significant makeover during the AFL offseason. Melbourne Stadiums Ltd’s Gavin Darby outlines the project which has provided one of the competition’s oldest clubs with a stateof-the-art training ground.
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s the football arms race continues to push the boundaries in all areas, training surfaces, or the players’ key place of employment, has probably been neglected somewhat while capital investments have been focused on front of house areas, offices, gyms and all manner of recovery type facilities. Arden St oval in North Melbourne was certainly one venue well overdue for some investment with players working on a surface lacking continuity in every aspect – grass species, irrigation, organic levels – which subsequently provided large variations in player interaction characteristics such as hardness and traction. That all changed for one of the competition’s oldest and most spirited organisations in the North Melbourne Football Club (NMFC) this year. Following the redevelopment of their own high quality building infrastructure in 2009, the football club, led by then progressive chief executive Eugene Arocca, acquired a Federal Government grant for the redevelopment of the oval. Melbourne Stadiums Ltd, which is responsible for the management of Etihad Stadium, entered an invited tender process and was awarded the contract to undertake a full reconstruction of the oval in late 2012. The Arden St oval forms part of the North Melbourne Recreational Reserve, owned by the City of Melbourne with the oval leased by NMFC. The reserve also encompasses the North Melbourne Pool and North Melbourne Recreation Centre which houses a gym, basketball court, community huddle and the Victorian Fencing Centre.
Australian Turfgrass Management
Federal funds were granted to construct a surface that allowed increased community use of the oval by the general public and organised sports such as lower levels of Australian Rules football including amateurs, juniors and women’s competitions. The City of Melbourne plans to complete the precinct by developing the last remaining sector of the site on Fogarty St with a futsal court and outdoor fitness type course in the near future.
Upsizing and redesigning The key criteria for the reconstruction was an all weather surface capable of supporting maximum use by the wider community while maintaining a high quality surface year round for the NMFC. Further to that, the existing oval was small (a total area of about 17,000m²) compared to the club’s principal match day venue Etihad Stadium which covers an area of 19,640m². The project involved a complete demolition of the surrounding infrastructure and a full reconstruction of the playing surface to similar dimensions of those at Etihad Stadium. The original concept involved the expectation that we would encounter some low level (Category C) soil contamination as is common on most inner city parks. The intent therefore was to maintain all soils on site in a cut and fill plan with only trenched material from the drainage and irrigation lines being disposed of offsite. Within the first week of starting the works however, we encountered high level contamination Category B soils, which come with disposal costs in