Des and Adam Barnard with the award won by the St Albans Sports Club. 89108_04 Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
By ADEM SARICAOGLU
THE St Albans Sports Club has been recognised for its tremendous work within the local community in promoting junior participation in sport.
The club received the award for Best Youth Development Program at a recent dinner held by the Community Clubs Association of Victoria, and general manager Des Barnard said it was just reward for a lot of hard work.
“It’s good to get some recognition for the effort that people have put in, but also it shows what the club is achieving, and part of it is getting kids involved in sport,” Barnard said.
“We do a hell of a lot of work in the schools in running clinics for them as well as several different programs for football and cricket.
“We also do a lot of work in supplying our community bus.”
Free of charge, St Albans provides a 22-seat bus to schools for students participating in inter-school sport.
“The problem for the schools is – they’ve got to charge the kids a minimum $20 each to try and cover the cost of hiring a small bus to get them to or from the fixtures they’ve got to go to,” Barnard said.
“And in a lot of cases the parents can’t afford it and then the kids just can’t participate.”
Most of the club’s initiatives are driven to provide local juniors with opportunities to live healthy lifestyles within fun environments, and Barnard said his son Adam had done a lot of work in providing Auskick and Milo cricket programs within the past couple of years.
“When we took over there weren’t many kids in there, and they were struggling to get numbers. Now, we’ve got the Auskick up we had 60 kids this year,” Adam Barnard said.
“The Milo cricket hasn’t started as yet, but when we first started with the Milo cricket we had about four kids doing it and now we have 12.
“It gives them something to do rather than either sitting at home playing computer games or being out on the street wandering around aimlessly.”
