By LUKE VOOGT
OCEAN Grove’s Peter Cullen is worried the town’s football club could lose its rich and proud history with the move to its new home ground.
Mr Cullen has been involved in the Ocean Grove Football Club for 30 years and said it “has lost (its) soul” in the transition to Shell Road.
“There’s nothing to see where we’ve been, what we’ve done and who we are,” he said.
“This club has a rich history of 64 years which no-one will ever see.”
Mr Cullen said Shell Road Memorial Reserve Pavilion was a brilliant new facility, but lacked adequate space for memorabilia.
“The problem is the facility was never designed to have its memorabilia,” he said.
“You go there and it’s just sterile. One of the great pleasures of being involved in local footy is going into a club’s social rooms and looking at its history.”
The pavilion only has one trophy cabinet, and too many of its walls are glass, Mr Cullen said.
However Shell Road Pavilion management board president Phil Emery said the council had done a fantastic job with the money they had.
Mr Emery said it was simply not realistic for the four clubs using the pavilion to display all their memorabilia.
“If it was open slather it would look like a dog’s breakfast,” he said.
“It wouldn’t take many of those massive oak shields to totally dominate the space.”
He said club memorabilia was now very high on its agenda, after an extremely busy start to the season.
“The board treats it very seriously,” he said.
He expected the board to address the issue in its meeting on 5 July and said clubs would have to be smarter in how they chose to display memorabilia.
A City of Greater Geelong spokesperson said the council would wait for the reserve committee to look into the matter before commenting.
