Why Coaches Feel There Are Not Enough Athletic Facilities
If you ask any coach in Northern California if they think that there are enough athletic facilities almost uniformly, the answer would be “no”; speaking as a former baseball coach that was the most consistent complaint among my fellow coaches.
Based on our Northern California facility study, we found that there were thousands of athletic facilities within 5 miles of every major Northern California City – most of which are primarily unused (less than 25%).
Based on our count, there are approximately 40,000 athletic facilities in the six-county San Francisco Bay Area. Most of these facilities are controlled by local city parks and recreation departments, school districts, and private non-profit schools and colleges.
What the Cities Said
When we talked to cities’ parks and recreation departments about why their facilities were underutilized, most cities’ and school districts’ parks and recreation departments believed that they that their utilization was actually closer to 75%-100%. One city between Palo Alto and San Francisco claimed to be over 100% utilized and they were turning away teams or leagues requesting more facility time.
The next weekend we went to that city’s facilities and did an actual hour-by-hour count of the number of times that their facilities were occupied from 8:00 to 20:00 – the result was that they were only 23% utilized.
The City Dilemma – Rented Not Used
Based on our review of the city outdoor facility schedules, the local soccer and baseball leagues are renting most of the available outdoor facilities but were not using a significant portion of the facilities that they rented – which means that there is a disconnect between the value or pricing charged by the city for those facilities and their actual use.
Based on our outdoor field use research, it appeared that the facility pricing was so low for local soccer leagues and baseball leagues that there was no real marginal cost to overbook facilities. This was so extreme to the point that the rented facilities were only being used 20-50% of the time. Additionally, the league uses the facilities primarily for practice, which is generally viewed as low-quality play experiences from a child development perspective.
The cities justified the rental of these facilities to the local leagues at low prices since the league’s parents were residents and voters who were already paying property taxes and could not justify charging market rates for these facilities to residents who are already paying thousands of dollars in property taxes.
Yet since the process is largely non-digital (the main tools used by parks and recreation departments are excel, PDFs, phone calls, and non-transparent internal parks and recreation calendar software) and limited city resources to verify need-local leagues overstate their facility need to provide flexibility in scheduling, which ultimately depresses overall use of the facilities and excludes new leagues or teams that could actually use the fields.
What the School Districts Said
Even though sport funding in public schools has declined, most California school districts still represent the bulk of high-quality sports facilities in most communities. With very few exceptions, every school has sports fields and courts because school leadership believes that sports play can be a critical part of child development.
Schools’ Limited Sports Funding Limits Use
Unfortunately, due to uncertain sports funding, the school districts have tried to protect those sports facilities from after-school-hour use in order to extend the life of the facilities by building 10-foot fences and/or employing security guards to manage access to their facilities, coupled with unaffordable charges to use their facilities even though after school use by the school district sports programs is usually just 2-3 months a year for about 10-20 hours per week.
For example, in March 2023, a City of San Jose School District resident wanted to reserve a soccer field for one hour for a 7-on-7 nine-year-old soccer game and the pricing (cost of the field, janitor, and other fees) was the following:
Mt Pleasant High School Soccer Field: $506
William Overfelt High School Field: $506
The Park San Jose Soccer Field: $145
Fammatre Elementary School Soccer Field: $135
To put these costs into perspective, the average US family’s monthly food budget is $400.
The Real Cost of Not Properly Allocating Use of the Facilities
For different reasons, cities’ and school districts’ athletic facilities are significantly underutilized by the taxpayer families who pay for the athletic facilities. This in turn raises the question if no one is really using the sports facilities, what is the point of maintaining these facilities if the local families are significantly limited (through undermanagement or cost) in using these facilities?
While some parents and leagues have raised complaints to the School Board or City Council on how the sports facilities are managed, it seems quite rare that those concerns get addressed, since the general School Board or City Council’s perception is that cities and school districts facilities staff are doing the best they can.
What are The Costs of the Cities and School District Sports Facilities Strategy
While City and Schools Districts’ field shortage factors are different, the costs are similar. As discussed below, the costs are significant both in terms of dollars, and the impact on our kids’ development and include the following:
Millions of Dollars of Lost Revenue to Cities and Schools
We estimate for most cities, lost revenue related to underutilization is $1.8 million based on an average of six facilities available for use over a 60-month period. School districts, since they tend to have significantly more facilities, can have lost revenue as high as $5-10 million over a 60-month period. [1]
While the field quality varies significantly, we estimate that out of 40,000 facilities in the Bay Area, at least 5000 of those facilities could generate that kind of funding.
Forcing Families to Select High-Cost Play Alternatives
For the kids who want to play more, there is only the very high-cost alternative of travel ball (which costs families hundreds or thousands of dollars per month just to create more play). This is particularly frustrating to hear when there are over 200,000-400,000 baseball basketball and soccer teams within a 30-mile range of anyone living in Northern California that would be happy to play another team near their local community, on underutilized facilities that are within 5 miles of most families.
Creating High Insurance Costs
Almost all the facilities require insurance coverage before they can be used, which is best managed centrally, at the city or school district level (all at a significantly lower cost) as compared to forcing individual leagues and teams to bear that cost – which further raises the cost to create play opportunities for kids.
Significant Time Investment by the Leagues to Manage Scheduling
League management spends 40-80 hours per season devoted to the scheduling process -which are hours that could be more productively invested in supervising actual play for the kids.
Encouraging Digital Play (vs Real Play)
Since travel sports are not an affordable option for most families if kids are not playing at those athletic facilities due to the cost of access or availability, they are playing somewhere else, which is most likely the digital world these days, which makes them less capable and prepared to thrive in their adult life.
It’s Too Hard to Manage Sports Facilities Effectively
The feedback from city and school district leadership is that changing to a better athletic facility management model seems overwhelming and highly risky, due to the complexity of the interconnected system of cities, school districts, leagues, teams, coaches, parents, and voters, that is too much for any one parent, league or municipality to understand and manage logistically and politically.
While we understand the challenges that cities and school districts face, digital tools and better practices already exist that could easily fix these issues so the facilities are better utilized and kids can get those play experiences that are so important to their development, all while minimizing the cities’ and school districts’ risks of changing how they allocate athletic facility use.
Some of the best practices include:
- Leagues could be better at estimating the actual hours by using a simple equation. Say we have 700 players with a 20-week season and there are two practices and one game a week: that works out to be about 5600 hours for practice and play. Reservations for the league should consequently be limited to the projected hours plus a 10% cushion for estimate errors, or about 6200 hours for that season.
- Cities need to provide a more automated, transparent, just-in-time field scheduling model to allow leagues ample time to operate but not exceed or hoard facility time which includes better monitoring for overuse. If overuse does occur those leagues should then be encouraged to return those field hours back to the cities so that they may be resold to other leagues or teams.
- Per the discussion above, school districts can lower the cost to rent their facilities, which would in turn generate higher revenue from the higher use of the sports facilities to then support the higher maintenance and replacement costs of the fields. This would also have the added benefit of significantly increasing play opportunities for families in their school district and region.
- Most cities complain that no such transparent field scheduling system exists for facility users and cities, but there are several systems that provide the functionality that allows municipalities to be fully transparent in scheduling, like GamePlay: Gameplay. Find players, form teams, book fields, and play Games (gameplayus.com), the digital solution that we have developed.
- In particular, GamePlay provides a priority system for local users and flexibility in booking hours, allowing leagues or teams to reserve and return unused facilities easily. It also provides a marketplace for cities and school districts to sell hours to other non-local teams and leagues, thus helping to monetize unused time. Finally, it provides a built-in insurance solution that significantly reduces the cost of play and increases the available playtime for kids.
- For coaches and leagues, a good digital solution will also help them to find and play games locally by including them in a large digital community. By connecting people with one another like Uber does with drivers, teams can more easily find others to play with, as well as local fields to play on, all in minutes, compared to what normally took days, weeks, or months, all at a very low cost (relative to travel sports).
Conclusion
California coaches’ perception that there are not enough athletic facilities (in an area where there appears to be significant excess athletic facility capacity) is a symptom of a facility allocation system that needs major readjustments in its approach, to maximize athletic facilities’ benefits to the families in their communities.
Thankfully, this is not an unfixable problem, so long as the parents, leagues, and municipalities that are key stakeholders, are willing to adopt the best practice solutions like digital scheduling, fairer pricing, and realistic field use estimates. These solutions are in fact in the stakeholders’ best interests, due to the handsome rewards that would be returned, namely increased play time, lower play cost, and greater funding to their local city and school districts. This would allow a future to be created where youth sports actively ensure that kids get the play time that they need to become happier, healthier adults.
[1] Since most facilities in California can be used 12 months a year -we estimate most communities facilities have approximately 2800 hours of availability (Weekends & Summer average about 8 hours per day/ with the rest of the year approximately 4 hours per day ) -and based on our review of most Northern California cities -the utilization rate (and this is generous) is about 20-50% of the year -which means about 1400 hours per year -athletic facilities on average are unused
Since the average hourly cost to rent these facilities in Northern California is between $20-$50 per hour –let’s say that only half those hours can be rented to non-local users at $35 per hour for 700 hours per year -that is about $300k in field rentals over 60 months and if the city or school district has six facilities -that results in about $1.8 million dollars in lost funding (larger school districts -this lost revenue could be over $10 million) that could be used by the city or school district to defray costs or reinvest back into youth services which may, in turn, reduce cost for other services like as policing or facility maintenance