Venues need to be made available for city codes

Normal, Sports
Source:

The National, Friday 14th of March, 2014

Over the next nine months there will be many unhappy sports men and women in Port Moresby.
The reason. They will have no where to play their games.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the Pacific Games building boom is that the city’s main sports venues will be closed from next month onwards if they have not already been closed.
The problem, and this cannot be claimed as an unforeseen situation, is that competitions still have to run.
Major sports like rugby league, netball, softball, soccer and rugby union face a bleak eight to 12 months.
The scramble to find alternative places to host competitions has seen some codes miss out and others having to scale back their operations just to fit into the congested schedule at some of these alternative fields.
All the people who play these sports, and some of them are at the elite level, is that they will not get the game time they need to work their way into form for the Pacific Games.
The others who play for the love of the game will be denied this past time.
It is a situation that could have been avoided if there was  some effort put into organising alternative arrangments for sports.
This is something the Sports Ministry in tandem with the Sports Foundation and even the PNG Sports Federation and Olympic Committee had to address before the first ground breaking ceremony for the venues.
There are venues in Port Moresby that can cater for this sports, if one really looks hard enough, but most of these venues which are situated in schools or institutions may be unwilling to lend their property for use by the codes because there was no prior arrangements in place.
The risk for damage to property and rubbish produced is not something school boards or land lords want to deal with.
So where do they go now?