Caption: Kankaanpää is known as a traditional baseball town.

The spectrum of sports offered by the Kankaanpää Sports Centre is surprisingly broad. Although Kankaanpää is known as a traditional baseball town, many other sports are at least as important, and for example, the number of track and field athletes has even grown to include top national athletes.

– It is important that the range of sports is wide so that we can get people moving. We offer everything from gymnastics to shooting, from orienteering to ball games, and from athletics to swimming, Ilari Köykkä lists.

The sports center's halls attract about 200 visitors annually, and the entire area has about half a million. The sports park has become the heart of the city, where people gather to exercise both alone and together.

– And if the sports park is the heart of the city, Hämeenkangas is its lungs, says Jorma Junttila.

The area's maintenance website, which shows the ski slope conditions and ski machine movements in winter, gives an indication of the number of visitors to Hämeenkangas. Last winter, the website was visited a total of one hundred thousand times, which shows that the area is a significant sports destination for many people from outside the area.

Both Junttila and Köykkä want to remind everyone that exercise is a fundamental right for everyone and the city must ensure that the threshold is as low as possible so that children, young people, working-age people and the elderly can practice their favorite sports. Kankaanpää has been working towards this for over fifty years and will continue to do so in the future.

Text: Tytti Wallenius

Photo: City of Kankaanpää

The article has been published in collaboration with the Kankaanpää Region.