Sportiest Ballarat suburbs

Lake Wendouree tops the ranking. Parkland means public parks, gardens and reserves mapped in OpenStreetMap, measured as area rather than as a count of parks. It is not a measure of tree cover, so a suburb of large private gardens can be leafy without appearing here. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 19 eligible Ballarat suburbs.

This ranking counts the public sport and recreation facilities within 3 km of each Ballarat suburb centre -- the aquatic and leisure centres, golf courses and stadiums a resident actually travels to.

Facilities come from OpenStreetMap and only NAMED ones are counted, which is what separates a public pool from the 40,681 private backyard pools mapped across Australia. TENNIS COURTS AND OVALS ARE DELIBERATELY EXCLUDED. Only 7.2% of them carry a name in OpenStreetMap against 83.6% of leisure centres, so counting courts would rank which councils label their courts rather than which suburbs have somewhere to play -- measured, the top fifteen by named court count and by true court count share one suburb in Melbourne and none in Adelaide. The number of DIFFERENT facility types nearby is shown on every row but does not change the order, because a tie-break that can take only five values would quietly become the ranking. COMMERCIAL GYMS ARE NOT COUNTED. A gym chain opens where the foot traffic is, so counting them ranks office and apartment density rather than sport: measured, the top suburb's 106 facilities were 71 gyms. They still appear on suburb and property pages, where a gym 400 m away is worth knowing. Counting anything within a radius still favours dense inner suburbs, which is a fact about where facilities are rather than a claim that outer suburbs are poorly served. This counts what is mapped and named nearby, not every facility that exists, and it says nothing about whether any of them is any good.

Rankings last computed 12 October 2026. Recomputed after each ACARA schools data refresh.