Facility Space

By Fred Engh

The list of challenges for recreation professionals is long and ever-changing. With the explosion of travel-team sports—coupled with recreation agencies offering a variety of their own youth-sports programs to meet the needs of a community—space to practice and play games is coveted. And making it all work can pose real problems.

I checked in with a couple of Certified Youth Sports Administrators (CYSAs) to see how their departments tackle the issue to ensure that young athletes have opportunities to practice and play the games they love:

Derik Perez, Recreation Supervisor for the City of Folsom (Calif.), Parks & Recreation Department: We created a Service Delivery Plan in 2007 that consists of policies and procedures to guide the department and the Community Youth Sports Leagues (CYSL) on the implementation of best practices for the following:

• Field closures
• Master calendaring for facility scheduling
• Activity scheduling
• Priority scheduling
• Duplicating recreational sports leagues
• Residency priorities
• Best practices. (NEW)

These policies and procedures assist our recreation-division staff members in scheduling CYSLs at 18 park sites, including 74 individual or overlapping facilities that are maintained, scheduled, and coordinated through the department. In total, our staff is responsible for scheduling CYSLs on 31 sites and 197 facilities.

We have also created a matrix of all of our CYSLs showing their allotted practice, game, and tournament times to see where we might have capacity. It has also allowed us to survey the facility requests we receive from the CYSLs. Example: The local youth-basketball program last year had 1,732 kids. The program provides one hour of practice a week for the kids in the schools. We schedule all of the school facilities with the school district through a joint-use agreement. The youth-basketball program states there is no capacity to grow due to the lack of facilities, when actually kids practice full court at all of the schools. So, if first- through third-graders are limited to half-court practices, 2,500 kids can be accommodated before maxing out. It’s matrices like these that we have been lacking over the years and are finally getting caught up. Our goal as a sports division is to educate on the benefits of multi-sport athletes instead of single-sport ones.

Rich Dixon, Assistant Athletics Manager for the Greenville County (S.C.) Parks, Recreation & Tourism: Facility availability is a constant struggle with our department. We serve a population of about 400,000 utilizing over 100 fields, so field use is in high demand. We generally operate at 80- to 90-percent capacity during the spring, summer, and fall seasons. To handle the high demand, we use a hierarchy when it comes to priority of use:

• In-house programs
• Partner programs
• Two large youth soccer clubs
• Little League baseball
• Charter schools
• American Legion baseball and several other partner groups
• General public field rentals.

This priority approach helps us in scheduling, field maintenance, and fairness to all user groups in the county. The partner groups have helped us fill in the programming/budgeting gap, allowing us to accommodate our large population. These partner groups have become our programming for youth soccer, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports. These groups serve over 20,000 youth in the county. Then, in addition to the partner groups, we have an Athletic Field Reservation System in place to accommodate smaller groups that are seeking field space. These groups tend to be single travel teams, for-profit sports-specialization companies, and everything in between. We generally can accommodate all of our user groups, but the field-rental tier has to travel to less-convenient locations or practice on slow nights during the week (Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays). Throughout all of our tiers, we require user groups to run national background checks on coaches, have liability insurance, and sign a user agreement. These processes have helped us provide facilities for most groups in the county that need field space.

Fred Engh is founder of the National Alliance for Youth Sports (NAYS) in West Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached via email at fengh@nays.org. To join more than 3,000 communities by starting a NAYS chapter, visit www.nays.org or contact Emmy Martinez at emartinez@nays.org or (800) 729-2057.