The City Council meets Tuesday, Jan. 21, at City Hall, 1825 Strand Way at 4pm. The Agenda Outline for the meeting can be found on the city’s website here.
An item of note is the discussion about youth sports at Sunset Park. The council will consider sports field use policies and provide direction for the use of the park as an active sports field.
The background of the issue, as taken from the full agenda packet, states:
BACKGROUND: The City oversees five sports fields in two parks. Four fields are located at Cays Park and one field is located at Sunset Park. While the Parks are not officially designated as sports fields, over time staff has developed a system of configuring, organizing, and scheduling the use of the turfgrass areas into sports fields. Field use allocations and assignments have traditionally been made informally.
With the completion of the Tidelands Park sports playing area, the Council passed Resolution No. 6253 on June 7, 1983, prohibiting organized sports usage at Sunset Park. On December 6, 1988, the Council passed Resolution No. 6803, allowing organized Youth Soccer and Little League activities for children eight years old and younger at Sunset Park (Attachments A and B).
Currently, four local sports organizations (Coronado Youth Soccer League [CYSL], Coronado Pop Warner Football, Coronado Rugby, and the Coronado Lacrosse Club) utilize one or more of the fields for their practices and games and are the primary user groups. When Resolution No. 6803 was passed, the organizations reported three of these four organizations did not exist or did not exist in their present capacity, with the exception of Coronado Youth Soccer, which served substantially fewer youth than today. On December 17, 2019, RGS held a round table meeting with representatives from the four organizations to better understand their unique history, needs, and participant numbers. All four organizations have experienced substantial increases in their participant numbers over the last five-plus years. The trend to organized sports is consistent with professional observations as parents/guardians have been inclined to turn to organized, supervised, and measurable sport activities in place of traditional “free play” activities. The increase in participants has resulted in the necessity for additional field time and space for organizations to practice and hold games. In addition, the current agronomic programs in place are no longer capable of maintaining the turfgrass surface necessary for year-round, high impact use. The agronomic programs for maintaining parks are much different than for maintaining a sports field, and the City has recently struggled with maintaining the turfgrass in the parks utilizing traditional “park” maintenance practices. This became more evident when each of the organizations discussed their current growth in participant numbers and future growth outlook.
The current field use allocation process requires sports organizations to complete an “Application and Permit for Field Use.” Once received, the RGS Sports Coordinator reviews the application(s) for completeness, insurance, and conflicts prior to the Director’s final approval. While there has been no formal prioritization system in place, informal priority was given based on when the request was received and historical use.
Staff has gathered some basic information from the four organizations, but the information gathered is rudimentary and unverified.
See more information on page 159 of the full agenda packet.
