Frances Atkins, Cooroy Gymnastics Club

1:51 Frances Atkins: today. My name is Frances Atkins. I'm a committee member with Cooroy Gymnastics Club and I'm joined today by Tace Scott, President of the Club, and Kirsten Norton, our gymnastics team

2:01 lead. We're here today to discuss the redevelopment of the Cooroy Gymnastics Facility, state-of-the-art sporting infrastructure located in the hinterland of Noosav, right in the centre of Cooroy. It's said to be the home for up to 1,000 future gymnasts and their families, as well as supporting infrastructure for local cricket and football clubs operating out of the same location. The investment in the redevelopment is a genuine vote of confidence in our club and the broader sporting community. While this is a great new story for our region, it comes with a

2:36 serious short-term challenge. We're here today because we need assistance from Council to help us solve it. What was originally set out in tender documents as a one-term shutdown of the club for construction works has now grown to two, potentially three, starting this year. This critical change, one we were not consulted on, is a big unbudgeted cost for a volunteer-led, not-for-profit sports club to carry, one that now threatens the existence of the club itself. We have 15 minutes and this is how we plan to use it. Tace will discuss the circumstances of the shutdown, Kirsten will explain the task of running a temporary gymnastics facility, and I'll close with what we're asking Council for and why. The redevelopment of the Cooroy Gymnastics Facility should be the best thing to ever happen to our club, not the thing that ends it. Our goal today is to discuss reasonable ways in which we can overcome this together, so the club doesn't fail, but rather thrives. I'll pass it on to Tace now.

3:46 Speaker 3: Thank you, Frances. So, Cooroy Gymnastics Club has been part of this community for 35 years. Everything we've built here is entirely volunteer-led and not-for-profit. This year alone, our membership has grown by around 40% and we have had our most successful competition season, with national and cross-border competitions. This year alone, our membership has grown by around 40% and we have had our most successful competition season, with national and cross-border representation and a run of personal bests for our gymnasts. When the redevelopment was first planned, keeping the club operational for as long as possible was a key priority for all stakeholders, and this was reflected in the original tender document. Construction was to be staged to keep the club open, and to minimise the shutdown for no more than one term. On that basis, the club was to remain open until the end of this year. We could maintain our competitive program, borrowing other clubs' facilities on weekends and outside of hours. And our recreational families could manage being without their usual programs for one term.

5:03 That is no longer the plan that we are working to. The contractors' decision to extend the shutdown to two, potentially three, is no longer the plan that we are working to. The decision to extend the shutdown to three, potentially three, was made without any consultation with the club. Losing our recreational program for six months or more puts the existence of our entire club at risk. It means our competitive program won't be able to compete for at least one full season. This is because for health and safety reasons, every week of lost training for our juniors takes roughly two months to complete. We need two weeks of basic strength work before our gymnasts can return to competition skills. There's one more thing that's worth understanding about a gymnastics club. It takes years, not months, to build a technical coaching team. I'm an HR professional, and I can see first-hand the shortage of qualified gymnastics coaching talent, endemic across the sport, and the difficulty at high performance levels and in regional areas like ours.

6:20 If we lose the coaching and management team that we have built, we can't simply replace it. We start again. We lose our grip on the opportunities that we've already begun building towards the lead-up to the Brisbane Olympics, just five years away, and the role our new facility could play in that. Right now, approximately 420 gymnasts, staff and volunteers, and local families call Cooroy Gymnastics Club home. Every one of them will be affected by what happens over the next 12 months. That's the backdrop we bring to you today, a club that has taken 35 years to build, that now faces an existential challenge. Due to a decision that was made without our involvement. What Kirsten is about to describe is the practical cost of getting from here to there.

7:28 Speaker 1: Thank you, Tess. I've worked in gymnastics, strength conditioning, and athletic development for 20 years at the Australian National Centre of Excellence, and I have an advanced silver in gymnastics, along with a bachelor of exercise in sport science. I've worked in gymnastics, strength conditioning, and athletic development for 20 years at the Australian National Centre of Excellence. I have worked across multiple sports, developing pathways for athletic development. It's not just in gymnastics. Gymnastics is a rare case, and to create a safe, operating, and thriving, but continually growing program is different. And that's what I would like to talk about. How to run a gymnastics program out of temporary sites, because it isn't like most sports. You can't run gymnastics from a park. I tried. A school hall, or a converted shed. If we needed a basketball court, a soccer field, or a tennis court, we could find one here. But there is no competitive gymnastics facility within our Shire. There is simply nowhere for us to go. Every piece of apparatus that we use, so beam, bars, vault, floor, has to be checked, and it has to be ticked off by Gymnastics Australia. It has to be certified to the standards at every single site that we use. So there is a compliance process that takes real time and money, and it has to happen before a single child can safely step onto our floor.

8:50 On top of that, most standard community halls don't quite meet our minimum ceiling height requirements, or floor loading, or even the clear space that's required to run gymnastics. We have been searching for six months, and know there are few suitable temporary venues in our region to use. From where we stand today, with the options available to us, we'll need to operate across two to three temporary sites. That means we need to duplicate almost every cost and effort, set up, pack down labour across two to three locations.

9:30 This is what it looks like in practice. Today, Cooroy Gymnastics Club runs 78 classes per week, and before each one, our coaches and volunteers will be bumping in money, beans and safety equipment, and then bumping it all out afterwards. If we are sharing a venue, that also means that we're going outside of their other booking. Multiply that task by two to three venues, and you see the real ongoing cost that a single membership fee was really never designed to cover. But the part I think matters most, though a significant financial burden, isn't the direct cost of relocating. It's what this does to our underlying business model, which is at risk not just during the shutdown, but ongoing. To stay financially viable, a gymnastics club needs its membership to be at least 75% recreational rather than competitive. Recreational classes run in larger groups, at a lower cost per head, and that's the revenue that funds our high-cost, low-margin competitive squads. They're the ones that produce the most money. They produce the results that Tay spoke about. It's a carefully balanced model, and only works if that ratio does hold.

10:48 Recreational families are also the most convenient, sensitive part of our membership. They're the ones that would quietly drop off if we were in a site further away, harder to get to after school, or just a little less appealing than where they now call home. So the challenge during the shutdown, and immediately after it, is whether we can keep enough of the right kind of membership in the right conditions to remain a viable business while we wait for our new home. If we upset this balance, no amount of fundraising can fix it. That's the operational and financial reality we're navigating. I'll hand it back to Frances to explain exactly what we're asking for. Thank you.

11:34 Frances Atkins: Thank you. Thank you, Kirsten. Despite delivering our best season in years, 40% membership growth this year, our strongest competition results, and the real prospect of an Olympic standard facility, this club faces an existential crisis. The cost of relocating and running split temporary sites is real, and so is the risk of losing recreational members as we move away from our core location in Cooroy. We've estimated the additional out-of-pocket costs of operating temporary split sites at $62,000 per term, including lease costs, moving and storing equipment, additional insurances, class programming, and administrative support, compared with the existing total revenue of $64,000 on our current membership, which already operates on thin margins as a non-profit community sporting club. If we lose between 25% to 50% of our current membership, we'll have to go back to our 10% of our recreational membership during this period, which is entirely feasible, particularly if we move outside of the Cooroy vicinity. That shortfall could reach as much as $97,000 per term. We were not consulted on the extension of the shutdown period.

12:50 If the contractor decides that we need to be closed for longer, that shortfall could double or triple. As things currently stand, the community does not believe that the club will survive the financial impact of this shutdown. Over a period of two to three terms, or nine months, our recreational members will find another sport, and our competition gymnasts and coaches will put down roots at clubs outside of our LGA. This project was designed to embolden the club, not to end it. But if we don't get this right, that's exactly the risk we run. The good news story of an Olympic-ready training facility becomes the story of the club that didn't survive long enough to see it open. Council will be left holding a brand new, world-class facility with no gymnasts to fill it. Gymnastics and its equipment is technical and carries safety requirements. It would be devastating for that to sit idle given the history and recent success of the club. The last thing we want to do is lose the home-grown talent and expertise it has taken us 35 years to build, right when opportunities open up in the lead-up to Brisbane 2032.

14:07 Today, over 420 gymnasts and their families will lose access to the club that's been part of their lives, and in some cases, for generations. With the new facility, our plan is to grow that to over 1,000 gymnasts and be the leading recreational and competitive gymnastics club in Queensland. We may be a community club, but we know with this team, we can achieve this. Already, we are pulling every financial lever available to us to raise funds. We've raised a volunteer levy from our members, and sought sponsorship and donations from the community. To date, we've raised just under $10,000 through these initiatives. That is well short of what we need, and a club-led effort was never going to be enough to absorb a cost of this size. We are a volunteer-led community sporting club. We do not maintain a big balance sheet. And certainly, we cannot plan for decisions made for us, without us. If the shutdown time frame in the original tender can't be honoured by a Council-selected contractor, our club needs financial support to keep operating during this period, or it will shut down for good. That's the position we're in today.

15:23 We want to be a community club, but we also need financial support to keep operating during business. And we do want to minimise the financial impact of the shutdown. Hence, what we're asking for from Council has three parts. First, temporary working capital assistance to manage the significant upfront costs of running concurrent, temporary sites. Not a grant, not ongoing funding, but short-term working capital support.

15:49 Second, greater facilitated access to the contractor, and to senior decision-makers at Council, as well as to senior decision-makers at Council, as well as to senior decision-makers

16:18 We've considered in depth what our club needs to ensure it is still standing and ready to grow the day the doors of our new facility opens. Please help us make sure the redevelopment of the Cooroy Gymnastics Club is a legacy story we can celebrate about what our region built, not what it lost. Thank you.