Sports groups oppose Wasps training ground plans as application goes in
Disgruntled sports groups appear unconvinced by proposals from Premiership rugby club Wasps to allow some community use of their proposed new training ground at Henley Sports Centre.
Wasps bought the site towards the end of last year from Warwickshire College Group, but their plans to convert it into their training headquarters sparked outrage among a large number of local sports clubs, fearful they would lose their home.
Aside from the outside astroturf area which remained open until lockdown measures came into effect in March, all the indoor facilities have been closed since December.
Wasps, one of the world’s oldest rugby clubs, currently train at Broad Street Rugby Club, east of Coventry, but says such facilities are inadequate for the needs of a Premiership rugby Club.
As part of their planning application for the Henley site submitted last week, Wasps have submitted a community involvement strategy, which lists a number of ways the public and sports groups could still use the site.
These include making the centre’s new 3G artificial pitch available to local sports groups during the evenings and weekends (subject to booking availability) and holding open training sessions four times per year for the public to watch and ask questions.
The club would also provide 1,000 Wasps tickets to schools, charities, sports and community groups in Henley per year for the next decade and provide local rugby clubs with a summer training camp supported by Wasps players and coaches.
However such measures have done little to convince the sports groups that called Henley Sports Centre home.
Russell Cox, from the Henley Sports Centre Alliance, which represents the sports groups who currently use the site, said: “The community involvement statement is just nonsense, we can’t accept this, it doesn’t offer enough and it excludes at least 90 per cent of the users of the centre.
“The important part about the bit where they say the 3G pitch will be made available to the community is that it is subject to availability and administered by Wasps, that doesn’t commit them to anything, they could offer an hour a year, it’s just a box ticking exercise.
“The offer of 1,000 tickets per year is laughable, they’re playing in front of 8-9,000 people in a 33,000 stadium, it’s not something that’s hard to offer when you’ve already got thousands of empty seats.
“There may be a few people who turn up to watch the open training sessions from Stratford and Leamington, but I imagine there would be very few from Henley and as far as I know there is only one other rugby club nearby which is in Claverdon, so this offer of a rugby summer camp is not going to help many people. Doctors tell people recovering from heart attacks to do light exercise at the sports centre, a rugby summer camp is not much good to them.
“We have seen no evidence that the site was marketed to other parties with a view it remaining as a sports centre, had we known the site was up for sale, we could have put a bid together ourselves, but nobody knew.”
A look at the application shows there remains a good deal of public opposition to the proposal at the moment, with the majority of the current comments objecting to the plan.
