Spotlight Vol. 9, No. 2: Accommodating the Rise of the World's Favorite Sport in America

By Andrew Turco, Research Associate

Every Wednesday morning now for several months, a group of RPAers walk through the office doors in their usual work attire and file out around six o'clock wearing soccer flats, running shoes, mismatched t-shirts and numerous awkwardly fitting mesh shorts. Then we go off to the fields, or really, the piers.

In many ways, Pier 40 at Houston Street on the Hudson River is the ideal pick-up soccer venue. Perhaps because the massive building that perches over the water still looks like the anonymous steamship and freight facility it used to be, the turf is surprisingly empty in proportion to the quality and size of the facility. The vast parking lot on the inside has been retrofitted with flood-lit turf big enough to accommodate several games on one large field, and two smaller playing areas have been carved out of the upper deck as well. With expansive views of the Hudson River in one direction and the facades of Lower Manhattan's turn-of-the-century warehouses and skyscrapers in the other, it's hard to believe that playing here is free. But most of all, it's a public space with the flexibility to accommodate a variety of users and activities and a model for the way public park spaces should be developed throughout the city.

All over New York City, the Parks Department and organizations like the Hudson River Park Trust have been accommodating the relatively new demand for soccer, inserting soccer fields into parks where none used to be and squeezing new fields into properties like Pier 40 that had no previous recreational functions. The city is constantly renewing itself, and New Yorkers are constantly finding new favorite pastimes. While these soccer fields may have laid empty in the past, today, they could be filled many times over.

Demographic shifts and changing cultural preferences have spawned this high demand for soccer in New York. What was once considered a second-class sport to baseball, basketball and football has become America's most popular youth sport. The rise of youth soccer leagues in the 1980s and 1990s has given rise to a generation of "echo boomers" familiar with and in the habit of playing the sport.

Additionally, as society places increased value on staying active, people are playing long after they've graduated from their high school teams. And perhaps no other sport in America matches soccer's gender equality, with the proportion of girls nearly matching that of boys playing in leagues. This wide-ranging appeal puts even more pressure on facilities, in a way that sports that appeal mainly to one gender or another don't. Finally, the number of immigrants from Latin America over the last decades has created another group of park users who, many times, bring an increased interest in soccer as well.

Not only does this new population of soccer players put a certain type of new demand on grassy public space, but even within this diverse group of players, different sub-groups place different demands on field space. Youth soccer leagues require organized space that can be easily managed by coaches, while those playing casually often need to be able to show up at a field and play whenever they can bring together the needed number of people. For others, playing soccer in a public open space can simply be a way of building community and staking out a part of the public arena.

Those in charge of parks have the challenge of investing in facilities that respond to a variety of residents' current interests and activities while, at the same time, balancing that responsiveness with the flexibility to accommodate new uses in the future. This balance is reflected at the Pier 40 facility and should continue to be a critical component of all park design.

Different communities have different expectations of how public open space should be used and even have a variety of expectations about how open space should be programmed at different times of the year. According to Chief Designer of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation Charles McKinney, fields in New York City are used around the clock and every day. With such intense levels of use, facilities for sports played in different seasons are often placed in the same area to allow for the maximum amount of play time, whatever the sport. Turf fields, which are increasingly used to accommodate the high impact running and long seasons of soccer, usually remain un-striped so that they can be temporarily painted or otherwise reconfigured easily. Turf even allows residents to take advantage of unexpectedly warm winter days.

Soccer is, in many ways, a highly adaptable sport. A ball, a field of any size and surface, and something to mark two goals is usually all that's needed. The success of Pier 40 is that it's not perfectly programmed or designed, yet it still meets the demand of today's park users. Although youth leagues occupy the fields from the start of the school year through Thanksgiving, unlike in many other places around the city, it's often possible to squeeze a very small-sided game within the extra space of the huge turf area or to use the upper field, with its less desirable lighting and dimensions. The fields accommodate a range of players, from the organized league players to the diverse residents who arrive without reservation for a game of pick-up after work. We've always found a spot to place our backpack goalposts, and in this way, Pier 40 succeeds at minimizing conflict among users. All parks within New York should ensure that no one group dominates field use.

The subways are known as one of the great equalizers of New York, a place where executives on their way to work stand inches from those coming off the night security shift. But pick-up soccer equalizes in much the same way and with more meaningful interaction. We've never once played without gaining an extra player looking for teammates. The strength of an open space depends on its flexibility and ability to bring together diverse groups for shared pleasure, something Pier 40 demonstrates is possible and which should be implemented elsewhere as much as possible.