The field wasn’t a nice place to play soccer to begin with, and then it turned into a parking lot. Literally.
Players, coaches and parents from the North Vancouver Football Club were stunned during a recent practice on the gravel field next to Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School when cars started streaming onto the pitch and parking right next to their balls and cones.
NVFC under-13 coach Dale Schienbein said that a few cars from a nearby construction site had been parking on the side of the field since the start of the season in September, but at one Tuesday evening practice in late-September the situation got way out of hand. Four different teams were running through their drills when the gravel field — which NVFC had booked and paid for — started looking more like Lions Gate Bridge during rush hour.
“I guess there was some function going on at the school and as people were coming in they noticed that there were cars parked on the field,” he said. “The parents just decided, ‘Well, we can park on the field.’ There was a steady stream of cars coming on, to the point where they almost had two full rows of cars on the field.”
Schienbein was forced to move his players and drills, essentially creating a driveway of cones for the cars to keep them away from the action.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, remembering his reaction to the unwanted intrusion. “I don’t know what the parking-on-the-street situation was like, but I’d feel pretty awkward and out of place driving onto a field with 70 to 100 kids and trying to park my car there. Somewhere in there I would kind of clue in that maybe this isn’t the right idea.”
Emails were sent and phone calls were made after the practice and the incident hasn’t re-occurred, but it underlies the still pressing issue of the shortage of quality fields in North Vancouver, said NVFC president Stuart Ince.
“We simply have dreadful facilities that we’re paying a lot of money for,” said Ince, adding that North Vancouver comes in last on the Lower Mainland in the ratio of turf fields per registered soccer player. With the lack of versatile turf fields and the constant closures of rain-soaked grass fields, North Vancouver kids grow up playing in school gyms or on knee-shredding gravel, said Ince.
“With the gyms and rental fields, we’re paying about $170,000 a year. That’s a lot of money,” he said. “We have to pass that cost on to the families. The families are then turning around and saying, ‘What am I getting for this? My kid is playing on gravel in horrific conditions.’”
The playing field issue will at the forefront along with other hot sports topics such as the potential loss of public curling and the Olympic swimming pool problem at a municipal election all-candidates meeting hosted by the North Vancouver Sport Council tonight (Nov. 7).
The sport council and NVFC have also sent questionnaires to election candidates and are posting the responses on their websites.
“We’ve been talking to pretty much anybody who will listen in the city and the district,” said Ince. “They’re starting to make noises about doing things, which is good. (But) of course it’s election time, so everybody is ‘Oh yeah, we’ll do that. Absolutely we need more turf. Of course we do. We’ll get right on that.’ That’s great, but we just hope that once the election is over we’ll actually see some action on it.”
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The North Vancouver Sport Council’s all-candidates meeting is scheduled for tonight (Friday, Nov. 7) starting at 6:30 p.m. at Zen Maker Lab located at 272 East 1st St., North Vancouver.
