IT’S said an army marches on its stomach and the same could be said for sports clubs, and something delicious is about to be plated up at Wangaratta Dragons Hockey Club.

The Dragons secured a tasty $10,000 grant through the Rural City of Wangaratta’s Community Grants Program to help build a new canteen by the club’s Cathedral College home field.

As it stands, when it comes to catering for their rapidly growing club and visiting teams, it’s been a slap-dash process which couldn’t happen every week due to costs and volunteer hours.

Club president Daniel Warner said the project was a long time coming, and vitally important to the club.

“When we have a barbecue or anything like that at Cathedral (College), it involves setting up gazebos, dragging up barbecues, bringing out eskys and all that stuff, whereas if we set up a permanent canteen beside the field it means we can have a fridge, a canteen, a powered facility we can store stuff in,” he said.

“We’ve done that for a couple of years but we actually really struggled this year, we had to pick and choose which weekends we were going to do

“We had to make sure we had lots of teams and people at home to make it worthwhile.

“It’s good that we’ve got so many amazing volunteers, we get a lot of parents of players who step up to come and help us run it, sell sausages and that sort of stuff when we did run it.

“It just meant we missed out on a lot of opportunities because there were times when we just didn’t have enough teams playing at home or didn’t have quite enough volunteers to make it worthwhile.

“It’s just a matter of coming and opening a canteen up, operating out of that rather than having to spend countless volunteer hours setting up facilities.”

Warner said the grant could cover approximately half of the cost of the project, while the rest could come from the club and their dedicated and talented members.

“The $10,000 will cover about half of the remaining costs, which will be good, and the club will put in the other half,” he said.

“The building itself, we’ve got a few plans - with volunteer labour, we’ve had a lot of really generous club members that are tradespeople in specific fields like plumbing and electrical and cabinet making.

“We’ve even got some members in the fast food industry who are going to supply us with some appliances for the canteen.

“Hopefully by the start of the season last year we’ll have to ready to roll.”