Wareena Park has a new tenant, with the Wangaratta Dragons Hockey Club officially moving into the old bowls clubrooms, setting down permanent roots.

After the bowls club vacated the rooms after merging with Wangaratta Bowls Club in 2024, the clubrooms had been crying out for new occupants, with Rural City of Wangaratta calling for expressions of interest for potential new tenants of the space in 2025.

The Dragons have been without a bricks-and-mortar place to call home for the majority of their existence, and once club president Daniel Warner saw the rooms were available, it was like it was meant to be.

“Expressions of interest for Wareena Park came up in January last year, about 12 months ago, I’d heard about it through the grapevine so I put in an expression of interest,” he said.

“We’ve got a lease with the council for the Wareena Park Bowls Club, so that’s our new clubrooms, and we reckon we can use the synthetic surface down there as a practice and training pitch.

“It’s nearly the perfect clubrooms for a hockey club – we can go down there, have meetings, run events in the clubrooms down there, the kids can jump out on the synthetic bowling green with their sticks and have a run around, hit balls about without worrying about having to hire a field or damage anything.

“It’s been a long time in the works, we knew we needed it, but it was just finding the right space at the right time – this just popped up and it was perfect.”

Marcus Goonan, Rural City of Wangaratta director community and infrastructure, said it was great to find a tenant for such a beloved space.

“Council has been actively searching for a tenant for this space since early last year, during which we issued a public Expression of Interest," he said.

"We received several submissions, all of which were assessed against a set of criteria.

"The Wangaratta Dragons Hockey Club emerged as the successful candidate due to their strong alignment with our goals and vision for the community.

"We look forward to welcoming the Hockey Club to their new base."

Despite the success the club has had on and off the field, Warner said the fact they were essentially homeless was a sticking point.

“Having somewhere to call home has definitely been a huge missing piece of our club,” he said.

“We’ve always known we’ve needed a space, we actually hired the bowls club off the council for our grand final party when our women won the grand final last year, we all went back there after.

“It’s good, with the car park on Swan Street there’s plenty of parking, it’s big enough that we can hold meetings and have functions there.

“We’ve never really had anything, this is our first real clubrooms, we’ve actually got something we can call our own and we can put our own stamp on it.”

Almost immediately after the lease was confirmed and approved, the club sprang into action, with a dozen or so members turning out to the rooms on a Sunday morning to set about making the space their own.

“There are a couple of really amazing things we can do with that space, and now we’ve got access to it and council has given us approval to mark out the green as we see fit, we can turn it into our own space,” he said.

The club will be running a preseason twilight hockey tournament for new and returning members from Thursday, 5 February, which will run for four weeks.

For more information, visit the club’s Facebook page.