What happened to the Union Stadium?
Resident and one of the Westbury parkrun committee members, Edmund Bailey shares how his experience has been at the refurbished stadium.
The Union Stadium has been used for many sporting events throughout the years in our community. Over the last two years or so, residents have been using the stadium for the Westbury park run on Saturday mornings, however, there has been a stop to their programme for quite some time as the stadium was closed for refurbishment.
Resident and one of the Westbury parkrun committee members, Edmund Bailey shares how his experience has been at the refurbished stadium.
“They spent over thirty million rands and everything is gone to waste. It has been two years now that we have been closed, we reopened in August but when people came for the launch they thought they were coming to an upgraded stadium just to find that the place was worse than before, it is vandalised and the stadium itself is still in its old damaged state, the field is even worse than before.”
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“There’s security here 24 hours, there’s a caretaker with lots of dogs on the premises but the place is still vandalised. The security guards were robbed at gunpoint, they took their cell phones, they can’t put their lives in danger for this place, the guys who come in here have weapons and they are stealing throughout the day.
“For our reopening, we had runners running on the outside of the stadium so that residents can know that we are back, just five minutes after the runners left, the police arrested someone just outside of the stadium so now we have to do a double lap every week because our runners will not be safe on the outside,” explained Bailey.
There were new courts for netball, volleyball and what looked like a 7 aside soccer pitch outside of the stadium but due to the vandalism and what residents claim to be unfinished construction work, the stadium is not in a good state.
Bailey added: “We are supported by Alberton parkrun, but we want the community of Westbury to get involved, the community is infested with drugs, there is absolutely no sporting facility for other sports other than the soccer grounds where the Steven Pienaar tournaments take place.”
“In all the parkruns’ they have point A and point B as their finish, but we have to start and finish at the same point and its disappointing just to see the state of the stadium especially since its been closed for so long for upgrades.
“What breaks my heart is that I thought that Province or the Municipality is going to do something for our community, our kids have to go outside of our community to play hockey, tennis, netball, and stuff.”
We tried to contact officials from the Department of Sport, Arts, Culture, and Recreation but unfortunately could not get comments as to what is happening at the stadium at this current moment.
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