Top honours for Everleigh AFL park in national award

The Logan facility boasts an MCG-sized AFL field plus a junior field, four gender-neutral player changerooms, an airconditioned gender-neutral umpires’ room, first aid room, club room, lighting, broadcast facilities, café, spectator facilities, digital scoreboard and fencing around the main field to allow for advertising to fund the local AFL club.

“It’s really set the standard for community AFL fields across Australia,” says Trisha Squires, Head of AFL Queensland.

“This award is saying that this facility is the best facility that has been built or re-built in the last 12 months in AFL across Australia.”

The successful outcome is due to a collaborative funding effort between the Queensland Government, Federal Government, Logan City Council, AFL Queensland’s Grand Final Facility Fund and developer Mirvac.

“The collaboration’s been really important. It’s a conversation that started in 2017,” says Trisha.

Mirvac’s Development Director of Master Planned Communities, Mark Clancey, agrees with Trisha.

“There was a very clear goal amongst the stakeholder group to point themselves at a best-in-class facility and the Ken Gannon award is the top award in this space.”

“The team went out and did a study tour and looked at all the previous winners. They took all the good bits, the good learnings and applied them into this project,” says Mark.

The research well and truly paid off with AFL participation rates growing at the facility and in the wider region.

“It’s so important for this western corridor. We’ve seen growth of nearly 200% since 2021, and it just means that people can come and enjoy AFL in a safe facility,” says Trisha Squires.

Club President of the Greenbank Giants AFC, Chris Luxford, says the gender-neutral changerooms have been a gamechanger for his club’s athletes.

“A lot of clubs that we still go to now aren’t built for women’s football. Last week they went to a changeroom where there was no door on the changeroom. How are they supposed to get changed in a place where there’s no door on the front of it?” says Chris.

“We are the envy of the competition. Everyone that comes here wants what we’ve got.”

The success of Everleigh Sports Park has paved the way for future collaborative projects to start taking shape.

“To have so many stakeholders all come together and point in the same direction in such a collaborative way is very unusual. This stuff doesn’t happen all the time. There’s definitely some opportunities in the future off the back of this,” says Mark Clancey.

Everleigh Sports Precinct is located at the centre of Everleigh’s residential community in Greenbank and is available to be used by the public. In addition to AFL, it regularly hosts a wide variety of community events.

For more good news sporting stories —follow Sport and Recreation on Facebook. For the latest plays from Queensland’s active industry, subscribe to our State of Play newsletter.