Netball action at Brisbane’s Nissan Arena.
Flexible Venue Design Chad Brown explains how commercialisation and diversification can future-proof community sport venues
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uture proofing community sporting facilities through commercialisation is becoming an increasingly popular venture helping make this sector more financially sustainable and less reliant on outside funding channels. Maximising a sporting centre’s potential by making it multipurpose through innovative design allows for additional revenue streams, giving sporting organisations a new lease on life. A sporting centre no longer needs to be viewed merely as a venue that holds sports games and accommodates fans. The aim is to go beyond watching a game, there is a fuller experience that sporting venues can offer if the design is right and the infrastructure is in place. Venues have the potential to evolve into multi-purpose commercial enterprises. This means that as multi-purpose buildings, sporting centres can be equipped to give priority to the fields of retail, accommodation and catering so that fans enjoy an all-inclusive experience. This economic activity generates a revenue stream, which means the sports organisation running such a venue can reinvest the profits made in the training of its athletes and in the improvement of the facilities. These projects have attracted investors who love sport, but who are also recognising a paradigm shift in the reconceptualisation of sports venues as potential vehicles for efficient and pro-active business opportunities.
40 Australasian Leisure Management Issue 143
Nissan Arena Nissan Arena, known as the Queensland State Netball Centre before its naming rights were sold shortly after its opening, is an eight-court indoor netball and elite training centre located in the Brisbane suburb of Nathan. Constructed by Hansen Yuncken and designed by ThomsonAdsett, the venue was completed in 2018 and has the capacity to seat over 5000 spectators via fixed and retractable seating around the unique sunken show court. The brief was to create a large facility that could be everything - an elite training facility, an event facility with full broadcasting functionally but also a community netball facility with the capacity to host national and international sporting teams. To achieve this, we had to undertake extensive consultation with key partners such as Stadiums Queensland, Netball Queensland, the Queensland Government and a range of sporting bodies. The challenge was to not only establish a high-profile destination for players, administrators, coaches and spectators but also have additional infrastructure in place to allow for multiple revenue streams. Put simply, we had to future-proof the venue through innovative design. For example, a lot of thought went into developing an effective layout and flow to allow ticketing to occur. Previously it was a player pay model, spectators watched
