Nearly three months on from when floodwater gushed over the levee bank that surrounds Princess Park, Shepparton United Cricket Club made a critical step towards normality this week.
Following a mammoth clean-up effort, United staged its first training session back at its home ground on Tuesday night, much to the delight of not just those involved in the club, but the entire Shepparton cricket fraternity.
This comes after the club was forced to share a training facility with Central Park-St Brendan’s for the first half of the season and was not able to stage sessions in the traditional Tuesday and Thursday night timeslots.
While all those at the club understand there is still a mountain of work to be done to get the facility back up to the standard of hosting matches, president Steven Tate said this week’s development brought lots of joy to the Shepparton United community.
“It was awesome to be back, being able to go back to normal training times of Tuesday and Thursday and just being back at home, it was a great feeling,” Tate said.
“Just being back to normal the morale among all the players out at the nets was very high and when we announced our return to training on social media the support we had from the community was massive.
“This is a wonderful first step for us as a club.”
When first confronted by the flood damage, there was a great unknown as to how and when the club could get to a point where even a training session was possible.
Tate explained the power of work that went into the clean-up in the past three months.
“The council had outlined a plan to us around what was going to happen prior to Christmas with the refurbishment of the main oval, and then following that I contacted them and said we’d really love to get back to training in January,” he said.
“So the nets had to be pressure washed and the run up areas and things had to be watered, so we just kept monitoring that and then in the first week of January we got to a point where we thought it would be possible.
“At the start we didn’t expect to be back training at Princess Park at all this season, so we were just making the best of a bad situation, so this has come a lot quicker than we thought, which is great.”
With the club now back training at Princess Park, attention now turns to getting the facility up to the standard of hosting matches and functions at its clubrooms.
But with so much still left to do, Tate said he expected a full return to come at the beginning of the 2023-24 season.
“The main ground has had all the scarifying done, turf has been transplanted across from Kialla’s ground to help with that process as well and they’ve been watering that all day every day and it’s coming along really well,” he said.
“Work will start very shortly on the centre wicket area, as we look to get the pitch back to a suitable standard for playing.
“The rooms at the moment we are still working through council to get temporary change rooms, canteens and bars and fingers crossed that’s all done before the start of footy season.
“For us going into next cricket season we expect there to be some sort of facility there, but we are still working through what it might look like permanently.”