LETTER: The Growth of Youth Sports & the Need for Field Space
Eve Lane resident and Rye Youth Soccer board member Emily Keenan shares her open letter to Councilman Nathan and City Council in regards to the growth of youth sports and why she thinks Rye needs additional field space. Note: this letter was submitted Wednesday prior to the City Council meeting and vote Wednesday evening advancing the artificial turf project for Nursery Field.
Keenan’s letter:
To Councilman Nathan and City Council –
I thought Councilman Nathan asked a very good question of our Rye Rec Commission at last week’s city council meeting. He asked why the kids aren’t playing in the mud like we did when we were growing up.
To be clear, the kids of today just want to play, even or especially in the mud. The reason they are not able to play on Nursery Field or our other grass fields has nothing to do with their inclinations. Kids haven’t changed since the 80s and 90s. They still just want to be outside and run.
The thing that has changed significantly since we were kids is the number of athletes using our fields. Let me lay out some trends in sports for you over the last 25 years:
- In the 80s and 90s, it was still mostly boys playing sports, with a sprinkling of girls teams coming of age behind the Title IX legislation of the 70s. Fast forward to today, girls participation in sports has increased by over 1000% since the passage of Title IX.
- According to US Youth Soccer, female participation in the sport has increased exponentially over the last few decades, with millions of girls across the country now playing soccer. And that growth is similarly reflected in our town. Rye Youth Soccer annually serves close to 1,000 children, split evenly between girls and boys. Some years we have enough girls trying out for travel soccer to field five travel teams in a single age group. The only thing that holds us back from making five teams is our lack of field space. We are very often limited to only four teams because we don’t have the requisite field space to host home games for five teams. Please understand that the Rye Youth Soccer is the largest soccer program in the greater New York area. This year Rye Youth Soccer was home to 45 intramural teams and 38 travel teams, more than any other town in this area.
- Meanwhile, while high school lacrosse was taking shape in the 1980s and 90s, there was no Rye Youth Lacrosse program until 2005. Rye Youth Lacrosse now serves over 700 children annually, split evenly between girls and boys and starting in Kindergarten.
- There was no Rye Youth Rugby in the 80s and 90s. That program started in the last 5 years. That program serves over 100 children.
- The Rye City School District athletic programming is also among the largest in the entire state, with 2 modified teams offered to middle school students per sport per gender, and a full slate of high school teams at the JV and Varsity level.
All of this adds up to a lot more kids, and way more than in the 1980s and 90s. It’s thousands of kids who want to play. And we have very few fields. And most of those fields are grass, and they can’t hold up under the use and so they have to be closed to kids for at least half the year so they can be used the other half. That is what has changed since the 1980s and 1990s.
Other towns have seen similar trends in the growth of sports and especially in the growth of girls playing sports. And they have responded by providing the kids with the fields they need.
The increase in kids playing sports is a good thing. All of the science indicates that participating in youth sports has enormous benefits to kids’ physical and mental health. And the increase in girls playing sports in particularly good, especially when you consider the recent science that suggests girls are most at risk to depression and suicide when they spend more time on social media.
Kids need to be outside. They need to play. Vote for kids. Vote for fields. It’s the right thing to do.
Best, Emily
If Rye Golf Club reduced the yardage of the golf course by a mere 3% it would provide enough room for 4 new athletic fields.
One way to accomplish this would be to reduce the yardage of the 11th and 12th holes near Boston Post Road.
It’s time to embrace change. Holding onto the past limits our potential. Looking forward and thinking creatively, with flexibility in our approach, is essential for the future of our children.
Currently, 73% of Rye’s outdoor athletic space is available exclusively to a group of just 700 individuals (140 of whom are non-Rye residents). Rye Golf is not a private club, it is a municipal facility that pays no city, school or county property taxes. All Rye Golf employees are City of Rye employees.
It’s time to share our city’s precious outdoor recreational space.
Let the kids (not just golfers) play!