Seventeen Queensland croquet clubs have each won $7,500 from the same grant program.
Not one lucky club. Seventeen, from the same round, on the same argument.
Bribie Island. Coolum. Eildon. Graceville. Headland-Buderim. Hervey Bay. Kingaroy. McIlwraith. Nambour. Southport. Sunnyside. The Laurel Bank. The Range-Maleny. Toombul. Twin Rivers. West Toowoomba. Wynnum. Big clubs and small ones, coastal and inland, $127,500 between them.
The program was Active Women and Girls. It funded equipment, education and training, all of it built around bringing more women and girls into the sport. What those clubs were really selling was that argument. Seventeen clubs made that case, and each was awarded $7,500.
Add up everything Queensland croquet clubs have won from government programs and it comes to more than $436,000. That figure is conservative. Eleven croquet clubs also won Active Clubs grants, several of them the same clubs again, and the government does not publish those amounts. So the real total is higher. I checked every recipient list the department publishes, on 30 July, and this is what is in them.
The big ones
Twin Rivers Community Mallet Sports Club at Eagleby won $135,087 and built two croquet courts, with drainage and irrigation. It is the largest single grant croquet has won in this state.
Those courts did not exist before.
Coolangatta Croquet Club won $86,590 for an amenities upgrade. Caloundra Mallet Sports Club won $51,920 to fix its courts, including subsoil drainage and laser levelling. Neither of those is glamorous. Both are the sort of job a committee talks about for years and never quite funds out of subscriptions.
Southport Croquet Club won $35,000 from the Gambling Community Benefit Fund for a new veranda. Worth knowing why they applied at all: the council had told them the old timber one, added to over the years, was non-compliant and had to go. The grant turned a problem into an improvement, and we wrote up how they went about it at the time.
Two things Southport learned the hard way
The veranda job came to about $42,000. Southport put in the last $7,000 themselves and spent it on screening curtains, so the veranda is usable in any weather rather than most of it.
A grant does not have to cover the whole cost to be worth applying for. It has to cover enough that your own money reaches further than it would have.
The second lesson came from a project they could not win. Southport has wanted court lights for about five years, and had a company involved for three of them. The cost was simply too big for any grant they could find.
Charlie Ernst told us what they found instead:
"There are funds available through the local council. Each of your local councils have a discretionary fund."
They kept in contact with the council and, in Charlie's words, "worked our way up the line till we got to the top of the pile" to become the priority for the next round.
That is money most committees do not know exists, found by a club that went looking after a grant application failed.
What the record actually shows
Two things stand out.
The first is that the women-and-girls case works. Seventeen clubs is a pattern. If your club can honestly say a project will bring more women and girls in, you have an argument with a proven record in front of this funder.
The second is Games On!. The Games On! Grassroots Infrastructure Program put $30 million into Queensland sport and funded 119 clubs and organisations. Not one of them was a croquet club.
Seven lawn bowls clubs were funded. Airlie Beach, Aspley Memorial, Bramble Bay, Burnett, Mackay Northern Beaches, Pelican Waters, Wellington Point. Bowls is our closest relative in most ways a funder can see: similar members, similar clubs, flat turf that needs the same care.
There is a straightforward reason. Games On! grants for community projects start at $50,000, and most croquet clubs are looking at jobs well below that. For most clubs the program simply did not fit, which is a sensible reason not to spend a committee's evening on it.
It does mean the money went elsewhere.
Southport found half the answer to this with their own council, through the discretionary fund Charlie describes above. Here is the other half, from a different council entirely: Logan City Council won $82,721 to build amenities for croquet at Eagleby.
A council can reach money a club cannot, and the larger Games On! stream is described by the department as typically led by local government. If your project is bigger than your club, the application may not be yours to make.
What is coming
Queensland has just published a new plan for sport, called Queensland Spirit: The Road to 2032.
It calls itself the first stage, so more will follow.
The Club House Grant is the one to watch. It will offer up to $3,000 for equipment, coaching and officiating courses, first aid training, and new ways to get people playing.
A club can win it without building anything or matching a large contribution. After years of infrastructure programs that started above what croquet clubs need, this one is finally the right shape.
Also announced: a second round of Games On!, a program called Grassroots to Gold for young players, coaches and officials, and Sponsorship+ for events that lift local participation. None of these are open yet. No opening dates have been published, and most have no published amounts. When they open, we will tell you.
One thing you can do this week
Every funder asks a club for the same documents. Certificate of incorporation. The rules. The ABN record. Two years of financials and annual reports. Bank details. Two committee signatories who can sign a declaration.
Put them in one folder now, while nothing is open. Clubs lose grants to a closing date they could have met, because it took three weeks to find the constitution.
We are building something for this
Two problems keep coming up. Clubs hear about grants after they close. And the clubs that do hear in time often stop at the application itself, because nobody on the committee has written one before.
CAQ is building a grants assistant to deal with both. It watches for grants opening and tells clubs, so nobody finds out too late. And it walks a club through its own application, with the questions worked out in advance rather than guessed at.
Where it is up to: the watching-and-alerting part works. The question set for the Gambling Community Benefit Fund is finished. The part your committee will actually sit in front of is still being built, and I am not going to give you a date I cannot keep.
What would make it genuinely useful to your club? And if your club has looked at a grant and not applied, what stopped you? Those answers shape what gets built, so tell us.
Twenty-one different Queensland croquet clubs have won something already. The next round is winnable.
It will be won by the clubs that are ready before it opens.
