'Relief' as Hampden league club reveals home bases for upcoming season

Hamilton Kangaroos have confirmed it will play football and netball home games at Hawkesdale in the first half of the season before shifting to Dunkeld for the second half of the campaign.

The club will be without a home base this season due to upgrades at Melville Oval and have been busy negotiating with clubs and leagues to finalise its fixture.

The Kangaroos will play home matches against Camperdown (round two), South Warrnambool (round three), North Warrnambool Eagles (round five) and Terang Mortlake (round six) before shifting to Dunkeld for matches against Cobden (round ten), Portland (round 13), Koroit (round 17) and Warrnambool (round 18).

The match against the Eagles on Saturday, May 11 was initially slated to be at Bushfield but has been moved to Hawkesdale.

New club president Dave Hintum said it was a relief to finalise plans and was looking forward to ramping up preparations for the season.

"There were discussions already in play before I started for this year and to pick those up and get it going has been a bit of work," he said.

"It's good to lock it in and know where we're playing. The initial plan was to always have Dunkeld for the second half of the season, they moved to Glenthompson for the second half and the Mininera draw didn't come out until January so until it did we couldn't really work out where we were going to play in the first-half of the year.

"The Hampden draw had to come out as well so it was a bit to work through. It was going to be problematic using Dunkeld for the first half of the season. We didn't want to jump around from venue to venue, we wanted to lock in a home base.

"With Hawkesdale Macarthur having its first half of the season at Macarthur, we spoke to them and they were great to deal with and now we get four games there."

Hintum said it was going to provide challenges at stages for the footballers and netballers without a home base but was confident the club would have a successful season.

He said both venues fitted the football and netball teams for Saturday matches perfectly.

"I've spoken to our senior (football) coach Brad Thomas about it, we firmly believe you can only control what you can control and not worry about the other stuff," he said.

"We've got a home training base at Hamilton and the guys have been settled in there so to be able to lock in the venues for our matches is great because it all flows on from there."

The Kangaroos will use Pedrina Park in Hamilton for their Sunday junior home base this season.