A PORTLAND sporting institution of 37 years is no more.

On Sunday owner-operator Daryl Barr announced to the community that the Portland Indoor Sports Hub – more commonly known as the Indoor Cricket Centre – will not be reopening.

After doing his best to keep the complex open through two years of COVID restrictions, the final straw came when a massive hail storm hit Portland on January 6.

Like many homes and businesses in town, the centre was flooded.

“It is time,” Barr said.

“It has been hard to come to terms with, all the tributes we got on the Facebook page makes you have a rethink, but at the end of the day old age (surprisingly, he is 72), COVID, the storm, and the time it will take to repair the damage, I think the decision has been made.

“It’s been fun, a great journey, but it is time to hang up the batting gloves.

“Unfortunately the storm has ruined the courts.

“We had a couple of inches of water sitting on top of the courts, and that seeps through to the glue.

“The glue has given way and we couldn’t put people out onto those courts, they will be slipping over all the time – lots of things could happen that we would not be in control of.”

How it started

The story of how Portland came to have one of Victoria’s first indoor cricket centres goes back to 1983.

Barr, one of Portland’s most accomplished outdoor cricketers – he was the Portland and District Cricket Association A grade Cricketer of the Year in 1978-79 while playing for Heathmere – came across the idea while on holidays.

“A mate of mine who I was in the army with, we went up to Cairns together for a holiday in 1983, and he took me to an indoor cricket centre and he told me he was going back to Victoria to open one of these.

“He came to Ballarat in late 1983 and started up Sebastopol Indoor Cricket Centre, and that was a four court centre.

“With the love I had for outdoor cricket the prospect of making a living out of running indoor cricket seemed like a pretty good occupation.

“At the time we had a retail store (Topsy Turvy Land) in Percy St and I was also working at Borthwick’s.”

And so the journey began.

Initial plans were for the centre to be established at Henty Park, but after a lot of discussions with the council of the time the sticking point was the fact that the building would be on land that Barr would never own.

“It was Crown Land so that was a bit of an issue, and when you build something on Crown Land you can be asked to move aside at any point in the future.

“It was not a risk I was willing to take and, realistically, we might have been evicted when they put the tram track in down there, so it was probably a good decision.”

Portland was hardly booming at the time, with the long-awaited Alcoa smelter project in limbo.

With property prices low, Barr jumped on a vacant black at Cellana Crt.

“The smelter had started their build then they stopped, so this came up at a pretty good price. We built the shed while everyone was paused.

“My thoughts were that we should have built two courts to start with but I got talked out of that and we ran with the one, and then 12 months later the smelter came back and we couldn’t handle the numbers, so we had to buy the land next door and build the extra shed.”

First game

Portland fell in love with indoor cricket from the moment the doors opened in May 1984.

The initial season had 32 teams, with eight players per side.

Outdoor cricket clubs, schools, businesses and mates established teams.

“Part of that was there quite a few school principals and teachers who were cricketers and they played themselves, then they encouraged their students to play, guys like Iain McDonald and Laurie Aitken.

“That flowed on later to soccer, the schools were very supportive of that, particularly Portland North.”

The initial season had very strong Tuesday night and Wednesday night competitions, so there was some debate about who the best team in Portland was.

“I think one of the grand finals was won by Tru Blu and Gerry-attrix won on the other night.

“I was keen for them to play each other but they didn’t, but in their minds they were both the A grade premiership sides.”

Mixed and women’s indoor cricket soon joined the fold, and by 1986 a new sport – indoor netball – took off.

“The thing that surprised me a bit was that we had eight ladies cricket teams.

“We had crowds packed five deep around the court to watch our grand finals.

“By 1986 we had in excess of 100 teams playing out here, cricket and netball, and we were running seven days a week.

“The juniors would play 9am to 1pm on a Saturday, which made me a bit late for some of my outdoor cricket games, and then we had midweek 4pm to midnight five nights a week and then Sunday 9am to 5pm.”

Higher honours

With indoor cricket centres popping up throughout Australia higher level competitions were formed.

“We opened in May 1984 and in July we sent our first representative team away to Ballarat.

“Darren Chapple was about 16 or 17 at the time and we put him in charge.

“They only had seven players, and it’s fair to say they learnt a lot, but I think they enjoyed themselves.

“We got pretty serious with rep teams – we won competitions in Horsham, we’d take teams to Ballarat, Geelong, Melbourne, and we did alright.

“We had players such as Tony Downes, Tony Hollis, Paul Cummins wicketkeeping, Midge Wilson, Mick Aitken was pretty good, Neil Indian, Rocky McMillan.”

Barr himself excelled at the game, and was regularly chosen to represent Victoria in over-age national titles.

“I was lucky enough to play 50 games for Victoria and got selected for the All Australian side three times, although that team didn’t actually play anywhere.

“With Victoria we went to the Gold Coast quite a few times, Darwin, Adelaide, Hobart.

“We came up against guys like Roger Woolley (who played two outdoor Test matches for Australia), really top players.”

Perhaps the most famous indoor cricketer of the 1990s was Western Australian Bruce Reid – the lanky left-armer who opened the bowling in 27 (outdoor) Test matches for Australia from 1985-92.

“Unfortunately I never ran into Bruce Reid, but I would always tell kids out here that Steve and Mark Waugh played indoor cricket for New South Wales when they were 17.

“One of the things that people said about indoor cricket was that it was detracting from the skills of outdoor cricket – taking cheeky singles, trying to hit the ball to the leg side.

“But look what’s happened to outdoor cricket now, T20, it’s what the whole game is based on so maybe we were ahead of our time.

“To me it was about bat on ball and the skills learnt in indoor cricket enhanced the outdoor game. We had one year (1995-96) where the outdoor Cricketer of the Year award all went to guys who were playing indoor cricket at the time – Tony Downes (A grade), Tony Hollis (B grade) and Neil Tonkin and Danny Pridham (C grade).

“To me cricket, whether it is indoor or outdoor, has always been a simple game. You’ve got a bat, they’ve got a ball and away you go. You make a mistake and you’re out.”

Other sports

After the initial surge of indoor cricket, a number of other sports were tried with varying levels of success.

“Eventually the honeymoon period would be over for cricket and we had the space to trial other sports.

“Karen Malseed and Lee-Ann Gibbins helped to formulate rules for seven-a-side and six-a-side indoor netball, and that has remained popular right to the end.

“At one point we had more than 50 mixed and ladies netball sides.

“Soccer was very popular, when Australia qualified for the World Cup in 2006 it was a big boost for us, particularly amongst the kids. We had teams from all the primary schools.

“We had 150 kids registered, plus we had eight or 10 senior sides. The senior grades were pretty full on, highly competitive.”

Three-on-three basketball, volleyball and tennis also enjoyed brief success.

Party time

As the decades wore on Barr had to keep reinventing what he had on offer, and kids’ parties have proven popular by combining one of his other businesses – inflatable playgrounds.

“We tried the inflatable stuff at the centre 10 or 12 years ago and it didn’t work, it wasn’t worth it.

“Then Inflatable World took off in Melbourne and I had a lot of people coming to me and saying that I should try it again.

“It went through the roof, Saturdays and Sundays, lots of kids’ parties.”

Barr has left the door open to continuing with his inflatable playground business, although increasing insurance costs and the inability to plan ahead likely to put it on hold for the short term.

“We still have the equipment for that so it is possible we could go into another venue, but we’ll wait and see.”

The end

While this month’s storms provided the final push for Barr to make the decision to close, in honesty it has been tough going since the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020.

“COVID has been horrendous for a lot of businesses and our business has been hit hard.

“Unless you own a business I don’t think you would ever understand how hard it has been trying to get through the last two years.

“You know you want to run things, you know people want to play, but you’re not allowed to.

“The netballers were fantastic – we had 16 teams and whenever we were given the green light to resume they were straight back out here.

“They were teams that had been here for years.

“But the stop-start made it really difficult for kids to keep coming.”

So how is he feeling now that the decision has been made.

“I’m feeling pretty nostalgic, there’s a tear in the eye.

“We have been getting a lot of love on Facebook – a lot of comments are from people who started out here as kids, had a break, and came back as adults or they might be bringing their own kids out to play.

“Kids like Brett Aitchison – he was out here as a little fella when his dad Lachie was umpiring when we first opened, and Brett ended up representing us in cricket and netball, and was still out here playing only a couple of years ago.

“There are so many people to thank, I know I will miss a lot of people, but people like Brian Duro, without him we would have closed up a long time ago.

“Lauren Pickert was always available to umpire, and in the early days Allan Warburton, Don Sherwell, Lachie Aitchison, Andy Smail, they were a huge part of it.

“And, of course, I have to thank my wife Eva, she he been a rock for me.”