ASB Sports Centre is impressive
The ASB Sports Centre, located in Kemp Street, Kilbirnie, is pretty impressive and a great asset for the community.
Not only do they have the equivalent of 12 basketball courts, changing rooms, and a café on the ground floor, they provide offices upstairs for variety of organizations: Parafed Wellington has its offices there and uses the facilities for its basketball players, High Performance New Zealand has a training centre there, Pacific Radiology and Wellington Sports Medicine are both located there (probably quite convenient at times!), and there are small rooms for individual sports. There are even conference rooms which can be booked out for the amazingly cheap price of between $20-$40 per hour. Oh and the café can of course cater for conferences.
According to a local resident in Kemp Street, during the school holidays when holiday programs were on the place was overloaded with kids, and they could have done with twice the space. The day I went was fairly quiet until around 1pm when a couple of bus loads of kids arrived. But once on the courts, they were into it!
Sarah Free 
this facility may be nice inside but is one big complex with 12 courts as useful to a range of communities as four smaller centres would have been? smaller facilities that arestill waiting for support like the Wadestown indoor sports complex .. Couldn’t a better location have been found than right next to the Ngauranga to Airport transport corridor? Is it wise to build such an expensive facility so close to a rising sea? And what about the $4million + a year maintenance cost?
Hi Jenny, Thanks for your comment, I appreciate the feedback.
To address the issue of location, I agree that the centre has created more traffic congestion , especially in the weekends, which may be partially alleviated by future roading improvements.However, I think you can defend the choice of site on other grounds. The sports facility is intended to be a community destination, and to cater to nearby schools – hence its setting within a 5km radius of 40 schools and close to several suburban populations does make sense. Also according to the review commissioned by Sir John Anderson, it would have been significantly more expensive to have built on the alternative Westpac-Trust site – land there would have had to be purchased, and the building more expensive as an elevated structure would have been required. Also the ongoing costs at that site were actually estimated to be more than at the present site.
To ask whether a big complex with 12 courts is as useful as 4 smaller facilities I think misses the point that the centre was designed to be a state of the art venue for larger tournaments as well as a community facility. It certainly does serve that purpose well, with ample car parking, seating 2200, and close to the aquatic centre and outdoor sports fields.
I agree about sea level rise being a potential risk, but its a question of alternative feasible and cost-effective sites. The Westpac site would also be at risk for sea level rise.
The centre is certainly well used- just looking at the events scheduled for the next few days , there is Turbo Touch on Sunday afternoon, Basketball on Monday evening, Futsal on Tuesday afternoons, fencing on Thursday afternoons etc. And that’s not to mention individual training in the mornings and school groups most afternoons.
But I do take your point about also wanting funding for other facilities such as the Wadestown indoor sports complex. It certainly is a hard act balancing the needs of the entire city and if you feel strongly about this one, I’d suggest having a chat to your local councillor(s), either now or after the election to see if anything can be progressed.