Fields filled with color
Saturday morning, rain or shine, the colors come out. Lush verdant greens. Bright scarlet reds. Brilliant royal blues. And a liberal mix of traditional black and white. The mosaic of uniforms creates a color eruption that will continue each weekend at Plantes Ferry Park throughout the spring, summer and well into the fall.
Spread 13 soccer pitches and five softball fields over 80 acres and you tend to draw a colorful crowd – a crowd that numbers in the thousands most weekends.
On the soccer fields, the uniforms are frequently festooned with logos from Diadora, Adidas and the ever-present Nike swoosh, and adorned with names like Falcons and Steelers. The players range in size and age from just-barely-bigger- than-the-ball U-10s through adult.
The softball fields are populated by a similar age range and teams that take the game at various levels of competitiveness.
“We get softball teams that take the game very seriously and we get teams that are just out there to have fun,” Spokane County Parks and Recreation manager Randy Johnson said. “And we keep a free agent list for soccer, softball and volleyball teams – which is a great way for people who don’t have a team but still want to play. We get teams that are a bunch of friends who want to play together or who went to school together, but need a few players to fill out their roster.
“It’s one of those things we wish more people knew about.”
And while the ages range on the field, the parking lot looks a lot like a family-vehicle convention on most weekend mornings.
Sit and watch for a while and you will see familiar behavior: Vehicles crawl into the parking lot in hopes of finding a parking space; kids and adults disgorge along with bags or backpacks full of equipment; the game, be it with a ball and bat or just a ball, is played at full-out enthusiasm; the worm-walk of teams walking past each other single-file muttering “Good game” to one another; and a mass migration to the parking lot for the reverse commute.
“Let me put it this way,” Johnson said. “This weekend we’ll have our regular soccer crowd out there and we’ll be running a softball tournament with 47 teams. Left field is going to be a pretty busy place.”
The Spokane Valley Youth Soccer Association figures 110 soccer teams will make use of the park on a fall weekend, when soccer is at its peak – 90 youth teams and another 20 adult squads. Figure an average of 15 to 18 players per youth team and you’re looking at 2,000 soccer players.
“And with the youth teams, you have to figure at least one parent is there with their kid, and you’re looking at a pretty good crowd there for soccer,” Johnson calculated. “I tell you, it’s an interesting thing to observe when the soccer kids leave and the migration of cars along the road there between the fields and out onto Upriver Drive. It’s a pretty slow procession.”