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The debate over a Potomac field that the county intends use for youth soccer has highlighted the growing demand for open space among recreational leagues.

In the spring and summer season, school fields have been scheduled for 55,000 hours, 94 percent of which is for youth activities, such as soccer or camps, said Ginny Gong, director of Community use of Public Facilities, the Montgomery County agency that schedules field rentals for school and park-owned fields. Park fields are already booked for 59,000 hours this season, 80 percent of which is for youth activities.

"The bottom line is we just do not have enough fields to meet the needs of our soccer teams, particularly our youth fields," Gong said. She does not have data on how many leagues or teams cannot be accommodated.

Park and Planning's 2005 Park Recreation Open Space Plan calls for an additional 73 multi-purpose rectangular fields and 15 youth fields in the county by 2020. The report indentifies 103 existing multi-purpose fields, and 70 youth fields.

The Potomac planning area called for 4.6 adult multipurpose rectangular fields while Bethesda/Chevy Chase called for 20.4 fields, in the report. However, Potomac was listed has having a surplus of 4.1 youth fields, while Bethesda-Chevy Chase was listed as needing 1.7 youth fields.

This season, the county has issued permits for approximately 375 sports fields at 210 school locations and 152 park locations, Gong said. The total may include field sizes that are permitted based on their use, and often booked to capacity, especially in Bethesda and Potomac.

"We are turning leagues away, we are turning people away," she said.

To provide more fields, Montgomery County is exploring partnerships with private organizations to develop soccer fields in three locations: behind the Potomac Community Recreation Center, on a 20-acre property on Brickyard Road in Potomac, and most recently at the Edison Park site in the Lakelands neighborhood of Gaithersburg.

This season, permits are issued to 75 leagues and individuals to use school fields, and 157 leagues for park fields, Gong said. The county issues permits for blocks of time to organizations that are responsible to divvy out time amongst their teams.

Because of the amount of hours the fields are used, many them are worn to the point where they are unsafe, Gong said. There are 20 park fields and 16 school fields that cannot be rented this season because they require maintenance, causing soccer leagues to reschedules teams from those locations.

Doug Schuessler, executive director of MSI Soccer, said his nonprofit organization serves 15,000 children in Montgomery County, with more than 900 teams vying for 1,800 hours of practice time and 700 hours for games on fields every week. Sometimes teams are forced to share fields because they are overbooked.

"The fields are simply overplayed and under-maintained and there is nothing we can do about it until the inventory is expanded," Schuessler said. "We have to look at the realities here. There are not enough fields for the existing demand."

The county has had to change its fee structure for field rental to keep from floundering in scheduling and maintenance costs.

Prior to 2009, fields were rented with a yearly administrative fee that didn't cover the county's costs, Gong said. For example, in 2006, school field scheduling had an administrative cost of about $240,000, but brought in $90,000 in revenue.

As of January, school fields are rented at $4 an hour, park fields are rented for $5 an hour, while regional park fields can charge $15 an hour for youth activities and $20 an hour for adult activities, Gong said.

For this season, renting school fields has generated about $188,000, exceeding administrative costs of about $150,000, Gong said. Any extra money is given to the school system to help with maintenance costs.

This season's park field rentals has generated $307,000 in revenue, which will be used by the park system to help with maintenance, Gong said.

The athletic field maintenance budget in the Parks Department for fiscal 2011 is $8.4 million, down from $9.8 million in fiscal 2010, said spokeswoman Kelli Holsendolph.

The Interagency Coordinating Board for Community Use of Public Facilities dedicated $1 million between 2000 and 2002 toward the renovation of 50 school fields, Gong said. Now it does not have money to renovate fields.

Overly competitive field scheduling leads to squatters, or teams that practice on a field more than they are permitted or that double up with another team's practice, Schuessler said.

Bernie Mihm, 53, of Poolesville was a volunteer soccer coach with MSI for 14 years, and said that practice space was in such high demand that he used to take his team to any green space they could find.

"The fields just get beat down," Mihm said.

He stopped coaching three years ago when his two children stopped playing, but said he supports the development of the Brickyard property into soccer fields.

"Why should we have essentially public school land [owned] by the taxpayers of Montgomery County leased out to a for-profit operation?" Mihm said. "To me it just doesn't make any sense."

Not everybody agrees that more soccer fields are needed in Potomac.

Gerri Grove, 57, of Potomac thinks that effort should be diverted to maintain existing fields rather than creating a new one.

"It seems absurd to me that they would build something new when we can't even keep up the fields they have," Grove said. She was one of the hundreds of residents opposing the development of the Brickyard property that attended a county meeting April 4.

Grove believes that while the population of Potomac remains largely unchanged, additional soccer fields should be constructed in parts of the county that have seen the most population growth.

In the past decade, Germantown and Rockville have seen the most population growth in the county, each growing by more than 29 percent, while Potomac grew 1.8 percent according to data from the 2010 census.

MSI plans to bid for the development of soccer fields at Brickyard at their own cost, Schuessler said. They have bid on a public-private partnership that would develop a soccer field behind the Potomac Community Recreation Center.

"We are trying to do good things," Schuessler said. "We have no shareholders but we have thousands and thousands of stakeholders."

ccalamaio@gazette.net

The story so far

Residents and advocates have clashed over a March 8 decision by the school board to lease a 20-acre property on Brickyard Road to Montgomery County, which intends to work with a private organization to develop youth soccer fields.

Applauded by soccer advocates, some residents have opposed the lease transfer and supported Potomac farmer Nick Maravell, who has leased the land behind his house from the school system for 31 years to run an organic seed farm. He will be allowed to remain on the property until Jan. 1.