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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
And you are making stuff up - I've coached my kids teams in both Stoddert and NWLL and most of the fields are heavily programmed.   In fact I have actual experiences with both Palisades Rec and Stoddert ES/Rec and both are almost always programmed all day on Saturday - Stoddert in fact hosts both soccer games and baseball games often times back to back on the schedule.

Also I have no idea where you came up with your 10% number - I suspect it is a wild guess but if it is based on something please provide a citation.

BTW since the second grade games at Hearst that you cite can happen with two games being played simultaneously playing that many games does not require anywhere close to 9 hours - have you ever been to Carter Barron or Stoddert ES when there are 8-10 games being played at a time?  For most of the day?

I'm glad Hearst is seeing some soccer games but the usage there is hardly something to brag about.[/quote]

I'm not making anything up. From talking to people in the DPR permit office I've learned that there are roughly 20,000 kids in all of the programs that use DPR fields, and roughly 2,000 of them play baseball. A link to the  DPR inventory of fields was posted upthread, you can easily verify that two thirds of the DPR fields are baseball fields.

By far the largest baseball organizations are Cap City and NWLL.

NWLL has their teams listed on their website. By age group:
Single A  8 teams
Double A 13 teams
Triple A 11 teams
Majors 8 teams
Intermediate 2 teams
Juniors 1 team

Total 43 teams. Maximum roster size is 14, if every team were full that would be a maximum of 602 players. I couldn't find Cap City's list of teams, but their calendar shows 20 games per week so let's say they're about the same, I think they're actually a bit bigger.

By comparison, according to the National Capital Soccer League there are over 10,000 youth soccer players in DC who play in leagues that are affiliated with US Soccer. Stoddert Soccer alone is about 7,000 players. There's probably another couple thousand who play in unaffiliated organizations like DC Scores and DC Youth Futbol Club. On top of that are lacrosse, flag football, frisbee, tackle football, rugby -- and all of those sports are competing for the same, scarce, rectangular fields.

So how does this equate to actual usage? At Hearst, the morning games are second graders, each "match" is actually two side-by-side 5v5 games and there are two matches at a time. Each team is about 14 kids, there are ten from each team playing and four resting during the game, so at any given time there are 40 kids playing and about 16 resting. Matches last an hour and go from 8am to 1pm; in five hours about 280 kids get to play.  At 1:00 they take fifteen minutes to move the goals, high school games start at 1:15 and go until 5:00. Those games are 11v11, maximum team size is 22 and average is about 18. Games last 1:15, so three games are played between 1:15 and 5:00, involving about 108 kids. So just at one field in one day about 388 kids get to play -- more than half the size of either NWLL or Cap City.

Let's compare that to two fields I'm familiar with, Palisades and Stoddert. At each, NWLL plays two games per day on Saturdays. Games are scheduled to last two hours, with an hour in between for warmups. At each field 4 teams, or 56 players, get to participate.

Now it's true that both of those locations are also used for soccer. Palisades has a separate soccer field, which hosts eight games per Saturday or 224 kids. Stoddert is multipurpose, and used for soccer in the morning and baseball in the afternoon. In the same space where NWLL runs two games per day, Stoddert runs thirty games per day --  five games per hour, between 8am and 2pm. That's almost 700 kids -- more than the entire population of NWLL -- in one half day.

And the reason for this has nothing to do with the nature of the game. Soccer players would love to play two hour games with an hour for warmups, and have the field to themselves. Crowding is a pain, not having time between games is a pain. It's all about how DPR views different sports. Baseball is a "real" sport, soccer isn't. Baseball gets field space, other sports don't.

The broader points in this  are that a) Hearst is heavily used; but b) DPR is a terribly mismanaged agency, and they have no sense of serving the public. They do a terrible job of utilizing their facilities, and matching the facilities they have to the needs and desires of their customers.[/quote]

You may be right - I'm skeptical of your numbers since DPR permits don't include the number of users and in any case DPR serves a lot of kids that aren't going to show on permits or use fields - but I don't want to waste time arguing about it because it isn't really central to the discussion here.

And FWIW I agree DPR is a poorly run agency but don't agree that it follows from that that they favor baseball over other sports.

But I disagree that Hearst is heavily used - the soccer field based on the evidence you have offered is heavily used on Satudays in the fall (and I presume Spring).   My anecdotal experience is that no one is using Hearst in the summer and that the Tennis courts are lightly used and others have echoed that.  While driving between two Stoddert games on Saturday morning we stopped at Hearst ES for their E-cycling event - only one of the 3 tennis courts was in use on a beautiful fall weekend day and often this summer when I went by none of the tennis courts were in use, even on the weekend.

But in any case the soccer field is not under threat just the tennis courts.

So since you just spent some time justifying the necessity of the soccer field because soccer fields serve far more users than baseball fields your own logic would dictate that the tennis courts be torn out for a pool which would no doubt serve the same purpose.[/quote]

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