Revealed: The Sydney suburbs quickly becoming sporting deserts

School and university grounds should be unlocked for weekend use to address a “dire” shortage of sports facilities, a western Sydney leader has said.

Adam Leto, the chief executive of Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, says the issue is particularly pressing in the west, where the skyrocketing population has put pressure on an already strained network of sports grounds.

“This sort of solution doesn’t require bucket loads of dollars,” he said. “It’s simply about sweating some of our existing community and public assets a bit harder. People design, build these spaces for people to use them, not to see them, you know, locked up behind a gate.”

Western suburbs dominate an analysis of limited access to sports grounds, supported by research from Leto’s group.

Parramatta, Burwood, Bayside, Waverley and Liverpool scored poorly on the ratio of sporting grounds and facilities per resident, far below the benchmark of one per 1000 residents – which no LGA matched.

For outdoor sporting fields and courts available to residents, Waverley and Parramatta fared worst, as the only LGAs with more than 4000 residents per venue.

The research covered access to fields, broadly for rugby, soccer or cricket, as well as courts for tennis, netball or basketball.

Other LGAs to score poorly were Mosman, North Sydney, Fairfield and Canterbury-Bankstown.

The majority of Sydney’s 33 LGAs scored below one ground to 1000 residents. For Inner West, Penrith and Georges River, the figure exceeded 1700.

Similar results were found in analyses of indoor facilities and pools. Data provided by the Committee of Sydney showed one facility to more than 4000 residents, in LGAs such as Liverpool, Sydney, Bayside, Blacktown, Camden, Waverley, Georges River, Camden and Randwick.

Areas with more than 2000 residents per facility included Penrith, North Sydney, Canada Bay, Parramatta and Canterbury-Bankstown.

Leto said the prominence of western Sydney areas in the lists was alarming, and the problem could get worse.

His group calculated that by 2041, when the population in western Sydney is projected to grow to 3.58 million, the region will require an addition 682 hectares of recreational space, equivalent to 912 rugby league fields.

To maintain the current level of access, the region would need an additional 812 multi-use facilities.

Leto said joint-use agreements could open such spaces as school ovals, TAFE grounds and university fields to community sporting activities.

“You drive or walk past some of the schools, and you do see locked-up gates on the weekend, and that in itself carries its own message. I think if you were to see kids playing at one of these sites, it would send a really positive message,” he said.

Citing Parramatta, he said grounds at more than 30 schools and two universities could potentially be unlocked by these agreements.

“Given the current budget restraints that we’re faced with, particularly at a state level, there’s not going to be a big pool of money sitting there to open up a whole bunch of new public spaces and sports grounds in western Sydney,” he said.

The state government has claimed success in a trial program to open school sites during school holidays. A spokesperson for Sport Minister Steve Kamper saying the government was “working with the Department of Education to identify opportunities for greater community access to school facilities, including sport and active recreation”.

The Committee for Sydney compiled the data on facilities for a report on the challenges facing sport in Sydney. As well as access to facilities, these included population growth, extreme weather and participation numbers.

Matt Levinson, a communication strategist at the committee, said the report broadly found that Sydney’s sporting infrastructure was “not fit for purpose”.

“This is a system that touches almost everyone in the city, in one way or another ... It’s massively impactful, but it’s really struggling, and you see that in the long-term flat-lining of participation.”

In such major sports as soccer, basketball and tennis, the report found, there had been mild to steep declines in participation figures since 2022, while other analysis has shown declining rates of physical activity among children.

Levinson said: “We’ve got to see that community support is incredibly important. We’ve also got to recognise that we’re not giving it the respect or the support that it needs to really thrive and deliver on that potential.”