Poor field conditions a definite concern

A disclaimer before I describe St. Charles North's football field as one of the worst I have seen at this point of spring for a long time: It's not entirely the school's fault.

Look around the North Stars facilities. Grass hardly grows anywhere. Certainly not where athletes run or tumble. The softball outfield looks pretty good, but it doesn't suffer the abuse the 50-yard line has taken at the school's stadium field.

It's not as if there's not grass on the field at this point of the spring -- but all too often, it's separated by vast swatches of dirt, making those green oases all too difficult to find.

That bodes ill for soccer players, whose life is spent moving a ball on the ground from point to point in search of scoring opportunities.

I have no doubt Herculean efforts will be put into the field this summer to bring it to playable shape before the late August start of the football and soccer seasons.

But right now, the surface is nothing short of shocking. The good thing is that the field won't be used for athletics the rest of the spring. The North Stars girls soccer team will play on plastic as far as its postseason run takes it.

This week, St. Charles North heads to the turf at Millenium Field adjacent to Streamwood High School. Sectional play next week takes place at Wheaton North's artificially-turfed Rexilius Field. The supersectional is on Benedictine University's plastic turf while the state finals once again take place on the Safeplay Plus- artificial surface at North Central College's Benedetti-Wehrli Stadium.

I do not know the total amount District 303 has spent on bringing the North Stars repeatedly back to life after a season of abuse. The field has always drained improperly. Even after considerable work, sidelines are still on an incline, making it the one field where a soccer ball will roll and stop inbounds rather than downhill on a field's crown.

If that money had been applied toward an artificial surface, it could have been in place by now. And the district would actually find that, in time, it would start saving money.

A week ago, I discussed the problems with playing girls soccer matches so early in the spring. This is often seen as the culprit. Why not play the matches in the fall?

Well, then we'd have football in addition to boys and girls soccer taking place at the same time. No stadium field could take that kind of punishment.

Ah, but you need to think outside the box, Mellema. Soccer crowds are smaller than football crowds. Give them a field outside the stadium on which to play.

That's a great idea, actually. At St. Charles North, they have just such an auxiliary field. Sadly, the grass grows as poorly there as it does on the stadium field.

Playing boys and girls soccer in the same season is a bad idea on three counts. The first is the lack of practice facilities. I'll stop picking on St. Charles North for a minute.

Where in this area do the practice fields exist for three or four levels of football, boys soccer and girls soccer to practice? Never mind game play. Schools such as West Aurora and Batavia are extremely squeezed as it is on limited space. Soccer teams typically use the same practice fields. Play the seasons concurrently, and you have just created a space problem.

If you stack the practices one on top of the other, you create two more problems. One is excessive wear on the practice fields. The other is the lack of lighting on those practice fields, and athletes now practicing late into the evening on deteriorating fields. It's only a matter of time before an ankle or knee is wrecked in a rut.

Beyond the spacious suburbs, think about the schools closer to the city, where space has always been a problem. If you think it's expensive trying to fix a football field every year, think how expensive it might be to bus a team to practice at a local field away from the school on a daily basis. That gets very expensive very quickly.

The second problem with synching the boys and girls soccer seasons comes in the realm of coaching. At Geneva, Ryan Estabrook coaches both boys and girls soccer. At Batavia, Mark Gianfrancesco is an assistant girls soccer coach while Jim McAlpin is the head coach. They switch roles in boys season. Scott Parillo and Joe Sustersic are the boys and girls head coaches at Kaneland and West Aurora, respectively.

And if you think ending such duality would solve the problem, then think about the assistant coaches who work in dual roles at these schools. Schools find it tough enough to fill all their coaching spots from year to year. This would make that situation even more difficult.

Finally, there are those people everyone loves to hate -- the officials. The IHSA has had trouble finding enough referees for all sports in recent years. Doubling the number of soccer matches played from August to October would take that situation to an almost extreme absurdity.

Fall soccer has been tried. The first interscholastic match recognized by the IHSA is listed as a Sept. 3, 1981 match between Naperville North and Lemont, won 8-3 by the host Huskies.

Girls soccer, independent from the IHSA then as hockey is now, played a fall season and a girls season. Eventually, the majority moved to a spring season and that became the standard.

Lost in the mists of time are those early mid-80s tournaments played at Niles West -- a history the IHSA should record and embrace. Naperville North and Maine South were dominant teams then -- their exploits are lost because there wasn't an official state tournament.

But in that crucible, decisions were made -- and one was that spring was the time to play the games. I'm not suggesting that all long-time decisions are good ones, but this has stood a two-decade test of time.

The solution is to move the girls soccer season back two weeks and play games until mid-June. The idea that parents are all headed out of town doesn't work because parents mostly move from being high school parents to club soccer parents as state cup competition begins.

And there's the final problem. Move the high school finals to a spot where it conflicts directly with the state cup, and the exodus to club soccer becomes worse than it is at present.

So there is a compromise and it fails to suit anyone. Club teams still get players too late from the most successful high school teams in preparation for summer competition. The high school season starts in the worst possible weather on fields that have yet to recover from fall abuse.

Dialog is needed, and it needs to come from the highest levels.

As for St. Charles North, at some point the decision must be made that the stadium field is a money pit. For everyone who wonders if injuries will be heightened on an artificial surface, you should walk by the field as it exists today. Someone will suffer a career-ending injury on that field someday given its poor shape. Whether it's a football player or a girls or boys soccer player is irrelevant -- it will still be an avoidable catastrophe.

I'd like to finish by saying that the time has come for plastic in St. Charles. But it's actually past time.