Jacqueline Nicolaou crosses the line in the under-14 girls 200m race. 76683 Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
By MICHAEL ESPOSITO
After 13 months without a home, Keilor Little Athletics participants returned as the Keilor Park Athletics Track opened on Saturday.
The refurbished track is now one of the premier athletics tracks in the north-west, after the grass surface was replaced with an all-weather track.
Keilor Little Athletics Club president Sam Barbuto said after several delays due to unseasonably wet weather (the track was scheduled to be completed last September), local atheltes now have a facility that meets International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) standards.
Keilor St Bernard’s Athletics Club will also call the Stadium Drive facility home base, after being centred at St Bernard’s College during the construction of the new facility.
“For them it’s almost been a bit of a homecoming, and it’s been the club that we’ve always fed our juniors to,” Barbuto said.
The senior athletics club was actually involved in forming the little athletics club 43 years ago.
Barbuto said the track is likely to host a number of events throughout the year.
“A number of schools in the Brimbank municipality are looking to host athletics here. In the past they’ve had to go to places like Aberfeldie or Whittlesea or Werribee or Williamstown. They now have a world-class facility in their own community.”
The facility will also host the northern metro region relays next season, which is the first time it has been able to hold the event now that it has an all-weather track.
The Keilor Little Athletics children have been competing at Moonee Valley Athletics Track while the Keilor track was being upgraded.
“We were really fortunate that the Moonee Valley City Council, the Essendon Little Athletics centre, and the Essendon Athletics seniors were very accommodating in terms of making the track available to
us over that period or else it would have been really difficult for us
to have kept the club going through that period, especially with the member base that we have,” Barbuto said.
“Because it was as big as it was, and the disruption that we had, we continued to work through any issues that we had, and the Brimbank Council’s been really supportive.”
