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City’s new fields are ready
GIRARD
The city’s five new soccer fields were finished last week, and the city intends to fence them to keep out vandals.
The fields, at Liberty Park, cost $126,524. The city intends to spend $20,000 for the fencing.
The fields were necessary, Mayor Jim Melfi said, because soccer is growing in popularity, and the Girard Youth Soccer League needs a place of its own to play. S.E.T. of Lowellville did the work.
The new fields also will take pressure off the baseball fields at Todd Park, where the soccer league plays now. The fields have had no time for maintenance and re-seeding and have taken “quite a beating,” he said.
Matt Dohy, president of the Girard Baseball Association, agreed.
“These fields never really had any down time,” he said. “It was spring, the teams were on them. They chewed them up throughout the summertime and right into soccer, and they just finished up in the last two weeks or so. So it was really tough on the fields.”
Dohy said he’s also happy that the soccer league has its own fields designed especially for the game.
Attempts to reach a soccer league contact were unsuccessful.
Soccer is also a family- oriented sport, and it will draw people to Liberty Park, which is beautiful but underused, Melfi said.
He added there is also a baseball field there that the high school baseball and cross country teams use.
He said that the seasons for all the teams span 24 weeks, so the city has increased the usage of the park.
He said that the closed entrance bridge to the park poses a problem. It was condemned earlier this year.
The city is waiting to see if it will receive an Ohio Department of Natural Resources grant by the end of the year to replace it.