Soccer community in a tough situation

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/05/2017 (3062 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the baseball, softball, football and rugby communities, it’s an exciting time with new fields being built or opened or their current ones getting a facelift this year.

For soccer, it’s an entirely different story. My look at community fields wraps up this week with the world’s most popular sport.

If there are any positive feelings coming from soccer, it would be cautious optimism for the future. The last six years have been incredibly rough for the community with Optimist Park flooding virtually year after year since 2011. Just when Brandon Youth Soccer Association felt it got rid of the silt and had the fields ready to open for the following spring, the melt would cause it to flood and the organization would be at square one all over again.

This constant source of frustration has done a few things. First and foremost, it caused BYSA to use school fields around the city. However, with nearly 1,000 kids registered in the recreation league, Westman FC premier programs and out-of-town teams for the last few years, it hasn’t taken long for those fields to get worn down. Some are almost unsafe for use.

The other thing the annual flooding has done is caused the soccer association to abandon Optimist Park and look at building a new complex.

Being forced to use fields all over the city has caused a lot of headaches for both BYSA and Westman FC as well as parents. Since only so many age groups can use a field at the same time, families with more than one child playing soccer sometimes find games or practices on different ends of the city.

With BYSA using fields four days a week, it also makes it a lot more difficult for Westman FC teams to practise in the city, unless they want to do it late in the evening — like after 8 p.m., which seems unfair for the younger teams that have nine, 10- and 11-year-old players —or they have to rent other fields, driving up the registration fees. Not being able to practise much puts Westman FC teams at a huge disadvantage for their provincial premier league games, which also have to be played out of town, normally in Portage la Prairie, because of the field situation in Brandon.

It’s not a positive outlook for the next few years.

“We have no other solution right now,” said Sheila Gonty, a BYSA and Westman FC board member. “We don’t have any place for fields. Everything is regulated. There’s no spot for us or money just to throw some fields up.”

This situation has been looming for a while with various soccer fields getting shut down over the years. There was one on Assiniboine Community College’s Victoria Avenue East campus which was shut down and is where the fire college now stands, and the local jail uses land where another one used to be on the south edge of ACC’s North Hill campus. Another field on 17th Street East is now a gravel pit, while the Canada Games Field at Queen Elizabeth Park has not been used since the flood in 2011 due to changes to the dikes. None of those fields, as well as the nine full-sized and two mini fields at Optimist, have been replaced.

There is a small light at the end of the tunnel for the soccer community, but it’s still a faint flicker.

The City of Brandon and the province paid for a feasibility study about developing an outdoor sports complex on the North Hill that would include 10 new soccer fields, eight redeveloped ball diamonds and three cricket pitches. The cost would be about $6.8 million, but not much has happened since the feasibility study.

The land the local group trying to build the complex is looking at using is owned by the province and it’s becoming a lot more difficult to acquire than originally thought.

“Unfortunately the land aspect is controlled by the Crown Lands and Property Agency, which represents the province in all property matters,” said acting city manager Rod Sage. “I’m trying to sort through the provincial channels to figure out what we need to do to make this happen.

“Early indications when we went through the feasibility study was the property didn’t seem to be a problem. The city partnered with the province so everything seemed to be OK, but we aren’t moving too quick on acquiring the land, but I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility so I’m still working on that.”

Sage wasn’t sure how much of a priority recreation facilities is for the new provincial government, but he said if the province wanted to sell the land for $1, he would view that as part of a partnership with the city and the outdoor complex committee.

One thing Sage was adamant about is the City would partner with the organization to help build the complex, but the committee will have to raise a lot of funds to build it.

Gonty, who is also a local business owner, thinks having that complex in Brandon would be hugely beneficial to the community. Not only would it help bring more life back into city’s school fields and alleviate travel issues for parents, but Gonty believes it will bring a lot of money into the community.

She talked to a few other parents of Westman FC players to figure out how much they spend on weekend trips to Portage for games and tournaments. She said they ranged between $500 to $700 per player. If BYSA and Westman FC could host games and tournaments here, she sees a lot of money rolling into the community.

“When they had tournaments here, they had 100-plus teams,” said Gonty, who noted teams from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the United States would come for the events. “From my team, that $500 per weekend per player and 18 players is $9,000 (spent per team). You put 100 teams in there, and that’s $900,000 coming into our city for a weekend and that doesn’t include shopping or getting a car washed or hitting a museum or something. That’s a ton of money.

“If we build a facility like that, and we have rugby tournaments and soccer tournaments and ultimate disc tournaments and cricket tournaments, could you imagine? If we had 15 tournaments here just in summer sports, that would be great for us.”

The big issue is raising the money to build the facility. A lot has been given to softball’s Ashley Neufeld complex, which opens this year, and Westman Youth Football Association is currently raising money for Boyd Stadium, which has a much cheaper price tag than the multi-sport outdoor complex.

Sage hasn’t heard from the committee in quite some time, but said the project would start a lot faster if the money was in place.

“If the Westman Soccer Association had all of its funds in place and was ready to roll, then we would be speeding this up quite a bit from the province, but I haven’t gotten an update from the soccer group and I don’t know where they’re at,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere too fast at the moment, but it’s not dead in the water, pardon the pun.”

Brian Cornick, who talked to the city council last April, is the president of BYSA and heads the complex committee, was not available for comment.

There is a possible temporary solution, although BYSA has not been approached about it yet. The City owns land at First Avenue and Veterans Way which was not underwater during any of the floods. Sage said that could potentially be used to build a few soccer fields to ease the burden, but no work has been made in terms of access points, locating high spots of the land and where people would park.

The soccer community would also have to help pay to develop that land.

This is a tough situation for the soccer community to be in. The sport has the highest registration numbers of any program in the city, it was at 945 for this upcoming season as of Monday afternoon, and the school fields aren’t getting in any better shape. The feasibility study, which came out last year, stated the city is in dire need of a new soccer complex.

Unless some money can be raised for the outdoor complex and the province agrees to sell that land on the North Hill, things will only get worse for soccer in Brandon. However, nobody could blame the committee for not approaching the community to raise funds when the process to acquire the land is taking so long.

Hopefully the provincial government will jump on board to this partnership between the complex committee and municipal government and soon to get the ball rolling. Once the land is attained, fundraising can begin to build the new complex and things will become a lot better for the soccer community, school fields and the city overall.