Proud to serve, honored to lead
In the spring of 2019, I remember a handful of us sitting in a living room. We were planning a nonprofit to build the next generation of Pensacola Youth Soccer. The league had been run for years by Dave Werdung, and he was hoping to hand it over relatively soon.
This was a fairly tumultuous time, even if it didn’t need to be so. The City had been looking to give its soccer program a home. Baseball and football had their own home fields. Soccer had been scraping by in outfields and whatever other space we could manage. The kids deserved better. An opportunity arose for the City to acquire the land the Northeast YMCA had been using next to Hitzman Park, here in District 1. The City was all for it. Anyone who'd had to play on a dirt baseball infield was all for it. Some folks weren’t.
I’m not going to re-litigate that here. But I do remember standing at the Scenic Heights Neighborhood Association in late 2018 and saying how I understood concerns of the neighbors who lived right behind the park. Lights. Noise. (Insofar as cheering kids and parents can be considered noise.) Those were manageable problems. Others were more of the invented variety — practices at all hours of the night. An even bigger fallacy was that the soccer league was somehow getting rich off … something. Nobody could ever fully articulate that one.
In any event, our job was to build the future of Pensacola Youth Soccer. I rather enjoy jumping headfirst into things and I’m comfortable in front of a camera and running communications. That is how I became the president of our new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, leading an all-volunteer board of directors. The Fall 2019 season was the first under the new PYS umbrella. We quickly improved communications, building on what I do in my professional life. And we quickly learned a lot.
But nothing could have prepared us for 2020.
We were two days into spring practices when the pandemic shut everything down. After a couple of weeks it was obvious we weren’t going to have a season, and we were able to give parents a choice: We would refund the unspent portion of their fee, or they could choose to donate it to the league. The fall season didn’t fare any better. Hurricane Sally hit in mid-September, and the outlying fields we’d been relegated to at Roger Scott Athletic Complex were buried beneath hurricane debris piles.
Meanwhile, work to build the new fields at Hitzman Park finally began, and I was part of a "Hitzman Park Liaison Team" tasked to ensure information about the rehabilitation project reached as many people as possible. (Those updates are still available.)
I look back at that with a good deal of pride. In the years since, we’ve built a flourishing program that I believe sets the standard for other recreational soccer clubs. We serve about 900 players and their families for eight or 10 weeks twice a year. We’ve always made being a good neighbor to those who live nearby a priority — and not just because I’m one of them.
There is no better feeling than being at the fields and hearing the kids. And the cheers from the parents. The smiles. The laughter. (Yes, sometimes there are tears.) There’s no better feeling than knowing that we did exactly what we said we were going to do, and then some. We built a league we all can be proud of. We improved training for coaches and referees, starting a junior referee program to help create a future talent pool for a critical youth sports resources. We have summer sessions at Bill Gregory Park on the west side of the city. We provide CPR training for our coaches. We mind our budget and have funded maintenance at the fields beyond our required contribution to the City. We continuously work to make our program better.
It hasn’t always been easy. There was a lot of pressure from a small group of people to not have soccer at Hitzman Park. We got a new mayor in late 2018 and I remember being at a transition meeting a couple months later — for a different district, mind you — that was hijacked over the plans for Hitzman Park. It was heated. And when one fallacy was defeated, another would rise up in its place. Some argued that property values would drop and the neighborhood would be destroyed. I strongly disagreed in a column I wrote in the Pensacola News Journal. And lo and behold, property values have increased, and the neighborhood is better today than it was then.
More important, though, is that the kids have a proper place to play. It's a space the entire city can be proud of.
All that tumult actually led to some of my proudest moments — when I’d see the faces of some of those who’d fought so hard against having soccer at Hitzman Park, on the sidelines, cheering on their children. On the very fields they fought against.
Today, there’s no better feeling than seeing a kid in a PYS jersey at The Butcher Shoppe after a game. Or downtown. Or at the mall. All over town, really. PYS remains affordable to all. It remains a good neighbor to Scenic Heights. And most important — it remains fun for everyone.
It is my absolute honor to be a part of it.