As a Sports College situated in the sporting hub of NSW, ACPE holds a wide range of industry partnerships across the community and supports numerous community programs and initiatives. Throughout the week and during campus hours, students can enjoy the state-of-the-art facilities at ACPE for both their academic classes and extra-curricular programs. In recent years, ACPE has also made it a focus to ensure sporting organisations are able to call ACPE home after campus-hours and during the weekends. ACPE has placed a specific focus on supporting a wide range of inclusive sports in their training and event preparations right here on campus. This focus has resulted in ACPE being called home for several organisations and programs such as Goalball NSW, Goalball Australia, Vision Impaired Tennis, Pararoos and Blind Sports NSW.
Sport NSW Disability and Inclusion Manager, Murray Elbourn, shares that “Over the past year, inclusion sport has utilised ACPE for meetings, conferences, training and competitions. In the Sydney metro area, it is increasingly difficult to find affordable training and competition, ACPE have really supported at all levels from local, state, national and international inclusion sport. This support is vital for smaller State Sporting Organisations for people with a Disability to maintain training and competition levels leading into the major events. Again, thank you to ACPE for all you are doing to support this inclusive sport initiative, it is much appreciated from Sport NSW and the greater inclusion sport community.”
With several lecture rooms, a gym and a sports hall available for sporting organisations to use, a diverse range of community programs can call ACPE home. However, it is not just the sporting organisations that are enjoying the benefits of our state-of-the-art facilities–ACPE students are enjoying increased industry experience opportunities in the inclusive space as a result of these new programs based on campus.
ACPE Lecturer and Pararoos staff member, Tim Palmer, had this to say about the recent partnership between ACPE and the Pararoos “The partnership with ACPE will enable Pararoos to access high quality facilities that further enables their development as representatives of Australia’s national team for people with cerebral palsy, acquired brain injury and stroke. ACPE will be able to provide a valuable resource that may otherwise not be accessible to players. Whilst the Pararoos have enjoyed increased public exposure and success in recent years, access to facilities and resources remains an ongoing challenge. The support of ACPE provides increased opportunity for the Pararoos to compete on the world stage. We are looking forward to enhancing this relationship in the future.”
ACPE will continue in their support of inclusive sports and will be identifying new ways in which to add value to the greater inclusion sport community in 2020. If you would like to get more information around how ACPE can support your sporting organisation or program, please contact Michael McKnight, Partnership Manager at ACPE: mmcknight@acpe.edu.au.
