Congratulations to our Sport and Recreation team, and also to the wider tennis community of Murray Bridge for supporting the growth of tennis in our district over the past year. This work has now been recognised, winning the 2025 Tennis SA Award for ‘Most Outstanding Council of Government Department’.
Presented at the 3 May 2025 event in Adelaide, the Rural City of Murray Bridge was announced as the winner for this award, for our work to develop tennis within the region. This is thanks to two key initiatives aimed at fostering participation and innovation.
We were fortunate last year to win a once-off Australian Sports Commission (ASC) Grant to help launch Pop Tennis locally, and this was a standout success. With this funding we were able to introduce this new sport format to the community - a first for South Australia!
The Pop Tennis program has been popular amongst all ages and skill levels - allowing community members to play on a smaller court, with a different ball that helps allow longer rallies, more fun and inclusion for people with varying levels of ability. The overall goal of this sport is to get more people involved in community sport, moving their bodies and engaging in positive wellbeing activities more often.
But it wasn’t just Pop Tennis that helped us win the State award, we were also celebrated for our collaborative work on the region’s newly established ‘Tennis Working Group’. This initiative helped unite both Murray Bridge lawn and hardcourt tennis associations, strengthening the region’s ability to promote and support tennis at all levels - without competing against one another. The focus was simply on sustaining and growing the sport locally by sharing skills, passion, experience, and ideas across both associations - ultimately benefiting everyone involved in local tennis.
This achievement once again demonstrates our Council’s commitment to community sport and wellbeing in greater Murray Bridge and also acknowledges our role as a regional sporting hub. There’s a huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes from our Sport and Recreation team as well as from some of the incredibly passionate local volunteers we’ve met along the way.
We’re excited to see tennis, in all its forms, continue to grow over the next 10 years in our region, and to see all sports thrive across our community.