It is a complete sh*t show there on weekends. In addition to there being no parking getting out of there is dangerous because the huge trucks parked on the side of the road block the view of traffic. I am surprised there aren't more accidents and that they don't hire someone to direct traffic.

The weekend of the volleyball tournament was the worst. Even dropping kids off in front took 20 min due to the traffic jam. Again they need someone there to keep traffic moving and prevent people from sitting there waiting to pick up their kids for 30 min.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need special event valet parking on the weekends. Our family is there 6 days a week for club practice and performance training. We spend an obscene amount of money for that through our club. That we have to walk a mile to get to practice in the weekends is insane.

Why don't you get your chauffeur to drive you? (Or take an uber.) If you're spending obscene amounts of money on kiddie sports, just fork out the 40$ to have someone drive you.

Not that obscene, or I’d pay 500 bucks a month for a family membership and get a parking pass.

Anonymous wrote:They need special event valet parking on the weekends. Our family is there 6 days a week for club practice and performance training. We spend an obscene amount of money for that through our club. That we have to walk a mile to get to practice in the weekends is insane.

Why don't you get your chauffeur to drive you? (Or take an uber.) If you're spending obscene amounts of money on kiddie sports, just fork out the 40$ to have someone drive you.

I was there for the volleyball tournament last weekend and thought it was just bad due to that. But sounds like it was always bad. We got there at 7 am and got one of the last spots in the lot in the back.

The St. James is one of the most dystopian surreal places I've ever been in my life. It's like the spaceship at the end of Interstellar. It's a place that needs to exist in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when all the natural fields are gone.

Yeah the parking is bad.

They need special event valet parking on the weekends. Our family is there 6 days a week for club practice and performance training. We spend an obscene amount of money for that through our club. That we have to walk a mile to get to practice in the weekends is insane.

Agree that the parking has gotten 50x worse in the past few years. I didn’t realize they’d moved the members parking (just thought more people were using the facility—both maybe it’s both).

If you manage to find a spot, the rink set up is terrible. To get to the ice you have to walk half a mile including down a giant flight of stairs—not something anyone wants to do with a hockey bag. Then, the locker rooms are teeny and oddly shaped—nearly impossible to fit an actual team in there at once. They moved the scoreboards but you can still hear whistles from the other rink. We had a tournament there and people snuck in the back entrance.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s terrible. We go there for swim meets occasionally and I dread it every.damn.time. Why they didn’t think to build a parking garage is beyond me. The pool deck is equally as bad. The poor kids have nowhere to sit on deck that isn’t within feet of the water on 2 sides of the pool. Very poorly designed.

We have a majority of our families saying they are going to boycott any meets at St. James. Making a kid walk a mile in the cold through an industrial park isn't the best impression after a meet.

Why can't you pick them up out front of the facility?

Most parents don't want to leave their 6 and 7 year olds alone in a facility with no security and thousands of strangers coming in and out. It can take 20-30 minutes to walk to the off-site parking, get your car, and make it to the front of the pickup line when it's busy.

I call it ninja parking. Only until this year have my kids not been playing there for some sport (they had been since it opened). The parking had gotten horrible starting 3 years ago. I was there for one of those marathon volleyball tournaments and one of my other kids had a soccer game in the middle of the day but instead of driving to my DC2’s soccer game and come back, I took an uber back and forth bc I didn’t want to lose my space. People parking ON TOP of construction material. People parking on grass and then other people blocking those people in. Parking in no parking zones, parking in front of and blocking exits, people with no handicap decals in handicap spaces, etc. Just completely nuts. Fights and screaming in the parking lot.

What also sucks: the food. I will never understand how such a relatively nice facility has such crappy food. Just disgusting, awful cafe right there in the front. Our teams started bringing tailgates or ordering huge Uber eat orders because again, you don’t want to leave and lose your spot.

This is first year my kids haven’t been playing a sport there and I don’t miss it.

Our kid was “sick” when we had a game time after 7. That place is terrible.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s terrible. We go there for swim meets occasionally and I dread it every.damn.time. Why they didn’t think to build a parking garage is beyond me. The pool deck is equally as bad. The poor kids have nowhere to sit on deck that isn’t within feet of the water on 2 sides of the pool. Very poorly designed.

We have a majority of our families saying they are going to boycott any meets at St. James. Making a kid walk a mile in the cold through an industrial park isn't the best impression after a meet.

Why can't you pick them up out front of the facility?

Volleyball parent here and this is what I did. I still didn’t like walking by myself in the dark through the garbage and junk to get my car to bring it back and pick up my kid. It was enough to make me want to boycott future tournaments.

It has gotten really bad ever since they moved the member parking lot. The member lot used to be on the side, and now it’s in the middle. An absolute shitshow.

Anonymous wrote:We didn't do winter league for lacrosse this year for this reason.

We did and it was a nightmare! Most of the team carpooled but we were still forced to park far away.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s terrible. We go there for swim meets occasionally and I dread it every.damn.time. Why they didn’t think to build a parking garage is beyond me. The pool deck is equally as bad. The poor kids have nowhere to sit on deck that isn’t within feet of the water on 2 sides of the pool. Very poorly designed.

We have a majority of our families saying they are going to boycott any meets at St. James. Making a kid walk a mile in the cold through an industrial park isn't the best impression after a meet.

Why can't you pick them up out front of the facility?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a member and get a parking pass. It's fine--no different from any large sporting complex that has a lot of people coming in for big sporting events. If this is your biggest problem, I envy you.

So after paying $4000+ for their child to play there they should pay another $200 a month to get guaranteed member parking so that they can safely bring their child to their games and practices? There are a lot of out of touch comments in some of these threads but this one is right up there.

The weird thing is that the St. James teams aren't even very good compared to the other local teams. They are always the bottom two AA teams in the league at every age, why would I pay extra money as a parking tax to be on the worst team?

Off topic, but if you want your kid to play AA and can’t make a higher level team, then you might look to SJ. Or, if you play for the WLCs.