The Water Log

A 63-field sports complex is coming to Randall’s Island. (People are pissed.)

It’s a balmy summer weeknight. A women’s Ultimate Frisbee team is running a warm-up drill in the outfield of a semi-lit baseball field in East River Park. Twenty yards away, a boys’ Little League team fields balls hit by their female coach. Errant baseballs drop in the Frisbee players’ midst like grenades, followed each time by a kid with an open mitt expecting his ball to be thrown back to him.
An Ultimate player nearly gets hit by a pop fly. She holds the offending ball and tells the kid who has come to retrieve it: "Next time, say 'Heads.'"
“Gimme the ball,” the boy demands.
“It’s common courtesy,” replies the woman, her voice rising along with her temper. “You could hurt someone.”
Like gangs that smell a disturbance, the two teams perk up; two knots of people begin to form where there had been two drills a minute before.
“You’re on our field!” the Little League coach yells, making the accusation general and bringing all of us into the melee.
“All we’re asking is for some respect,” says the Ultimate player, using the kid’s baseball to gesticulate angrily.
“You want me to call the cops?” the coach threatens. “Because you’re trespassing on our field.”
I glance at my watch. She’s right, it’s 8:55 p.m. We had gotten here half an hour early to warm up, so that we could get a halfway decent practice in before the lights turned off at 10:30, but our permit did not officially begin until 9 p.m.
Nevertheless, my blood is beginning to roil. As the captain of the Ultimate team, I decide it’s time for me to intervene. “Go ahead!” I yell back at her. “By the time they get here, it’ll be our field.”
It was, in retrospect, ridiculous. A group of professional and college-aged women out here to play a sport whose main tenet is “Spirit of the Game,” and a Little League team coached by a volunteer whose goal is to keep Lower East Side kids off the streets and teach them baseball – and we’re threatening to call the cops on each other.
Why can’t we all just get along? Because there’s not enough space. We’ve exchanged looks, if not angry words, with practitioners of rugby, soccer, baseball, Capoeira, touch football – even the Brooklyn men’s Ultimate team, whose ranks include spouses of the women’s team. All I can do is shrug my shoulders and apologize to our recruits fresh out of Stanford: “This is New York Ultimate,” I smile ingratiatingly, throwing girls’ bags over the chain link fence to a forgotten slip of a field where the lawn may be a foot high, but at least we can do plyos.
But there’s a buzz going around the athletic community: more fields are on the way. The Randall’s Island Sports Foundation has been plugging away on a three-phase plan for over fifteen years. The first phase, completed in 2006, was $42 million Icahn Stadium and a soccer field.
The second phase will be the largest addition of playing fields in the city in over three decades. It will include renovations of the existing 36 fields on Randall’s Island, many of which are dusty and un-lined, and the addition of 27 new fields, for a total of 63 playing fields. If all goes according to plan, phase two should begin in early 2007.
Not everyone is psyched. The field renovations will be footed, in part, by the 20 private schools that currently use the majority of the fields. They’ll be chipping in $52.4 million over 20 years, and the city will cover the rest (more than $90 million of city money has been earmarked so far). In return, those 20 schools will have exclusive use of at least 42 of the new fields from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the prime twenty weeks of the year. Next in line for prime time on the remaining 21 fields are public school kids, then community and adult leagues. (It’s easier for adults to play at night, but not until the fields are lit. So for now, everyone’s vying for the same time.)
At a hearing of the City Council’s Parks Committee last week, the normal attendees were joined by athletes and coaches wedged in standing room, waiting their turn to explain why their club needs and deserves access to these fields. After a long hour and a half, a dad with a baby girl in a stroller had to go; he handed his presentation on CYO Baseball to someone else, to be delivered to the powers that be.
“I’m disappointed in you. To do something like this…” Councilman Charles Barron lectured Adrian Benepe, the Parks Commissioner, after inquiring rhetorically about the ethnic breakdown of the 20 private schools. “No pun intended, but you’re way out of the ballpark.”
The anger in that room is justified – it isn’t fair that private school kids should have better fields, in addition to better everything else – but the thing is, you need money to make things happen.
Going to the private schools for that money was “a no-brainer,” said Aimee Boden, executive director of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, because they’re the ones who currently use the fields, who’ll be displaced by construction, and who would, by the Parks Department’s own “grandfathering” clause, get first dibs on the renovated fields even if they hadn’t chipped in.
Public-private partnership is how Icahn Stadium got built. It seems to me to be how the world works.