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Members of Ashburton Collegiate Rugby Club have called a special general meeting to discuss the future of the club, and its Smithfield Rd clubrooms.
The meeting is at that site on Tuesday at 7pm.
Collegiate has for many years had a clubrooms and fields on Smithfield Road, as well as at the southern end of Chalmers Ave on Robilliard Park. The latter also has three spectator-friendly squash courts.
Club president Brent Ferguson said it was an issue that should have been addressed years ago, but had been deferred, mostly due to historical ties.
He said the people who “kick up a stink” were often not active members.
"They’ve got ties to one of the clubrooms — it was two different clubs back in the day — and they don’t want us to do things at either ground,” he said.
“But at the end of it, we need to do something.”
Each year, the club paid two sets of rates and insurances on the two sites with a dwindling rugby membership.
“It’s not great,” he said, of those numbers.
“That's why we are trying to do something, trying to start something - a new chapter so to speak.”
He said rather than having two costs of everything, it would be easier to have one site and, as its costly to build squash courts, a motion was being proposed to sell the north ground.
It would be a “hell of a lot easier for volunteers running the club”, he said.
“Then (look to) rebuild and grow. Grow back up to where we were.”
The move had the potential to be give the club a new lease on life especially with less costs and the opening of the second Ashburton bridge right at the gate of the Chalmers Ave grounds.
It was a prospect that encouraged Ferguson.
He said the southern grounds, which had nestled on a dead end street for years, will be on a main thoroughfare on the eastern side of Ashburton.
It’s going to be “quite a busy wee road” and could open opportunities for the club’s growth, he said.