Reply to Hearst Playground story in Current

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The entire Hearst Field is used for under-12 soccer every Saturday, Spring and Fall.

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I'm glad the park gets some use on Saturday's in the spring and fall.

The rest of the year it is almost always some solitary folks with their dogs running illegally off leash.

But the soccer use is no argument against a pool - really it has nothing to do with it as every single proposal for Hearst maintains a large soccer field.[/quote]

Actually, they show shrinkage of the field, but DPR deliberately chose not to provide any actual dimensions to disguise the extent of the impact.[/quote]

God we keep going in circles where opponents continue to make things up.

One proposal doesn't even touch the field.

And most of what the opponents are mumbling about are their own perceptions of changes to the fields dimensions.

But what is odd is that most of the opponents are way past the age of having any skin in the game when it comes to youth soccer.

And as someone pointed out in a post in the last couple of days most of the games being played at Hearst are not even using the full dimensions of the field and instead are splitting the space up to play two games.

But keeping making things up - I guess that is what I'd do if neither the facts nor public opinion were on my side.[/quote]

It's awfully unfair for you to be accusing others of making things up when you don't have your facts straight.

It is a little complicated to talk about the current use of the field because there isn't really any such thing as "the field." DPR doesn't maintain lines or goals, it's just a large grassy (or "grassy") patch that people can divide up as they see fit. The flat area is about 65 by 105 yards. If you look on Google Maps right now the aerial photo shows it divided into three third grade fields, each 35x50 yards. This season it's being used for high school and second grade, high school is a single field 60x105, second grade is four fields each 30x40.

Where the proposals have shown dimensions the field is never larger than 100x50 yards, and often about three quarters that size. None of the configurations above would fit on a 100x50 field.  This is what the folks at DPR don't seem to get, that the dimensions matter, even though their business is nominally recreation. To them, a soccer field is a soccer field.[/quote]

Yet as you just pointed out the field isn't even being used in the manner it is laid out for yet opponents of change are fighting any change in how the field is laid out.

So what matters - being able to get the games in at a particular site or having a field of some particular dimension?

Also interesting to learn that the majority of the field use at Stoddert is in smaller configurations for which there would still be plenty of options even under a shrunken field and also for which Stoddert has many other options.  Apparently the incredible demand for a full time field that the neighbors keep going on and on about is not really such an incredible demand.

In any case if the neighbors are so concerned about Stoddert and advocating for its interests (and in a sense they should be because it is the only time anyone actually uses the park) then the simply position they should take is to be adamant that the pool simply go where the tennis courts are and leave the soccer field alone.

Barely anyone will notice as the tennis courts are lightly used.[/quote]

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