Naperville Park District is preparing to install the city’s first-ever, lighted synthetic turf field as part of about 20 acres of new parkland being developed just to the southwest of the 25-acre Nike Park.
Teams in the traveling soccer club are improving, which means more teams want a chance to play them. But Naperville’s lack of lighted fields has made it difficult to schedule games, said Mike Plant, 16, a student at Naperville Central High School.
In fact, the club, Ajax F.C. Chicago, has so few field options in the city that Plant’s team has resorted to playing games in the outfield of a baseball field at Frontier Park, said the club’s administrator, Dagmar Kaufman. And the city has no synthetic turf field, which Plant favors because grass fields frequently get torn up after rainfalls.
“If it rains, grass fields are really bad, because people play on them and then the field gets destroyed, and then it’s really dumpy and it changes the game completely,” said Plant. “And our team sometimes has had trouble scheduling games because other teams can’t play us later in the evening because Naperville has such limited field space.”
All that is about to change, as Naperville Park District officials prepare to install the city’s first-ever, lighted synthetic turf field as part of about 20 acres of new parkland being developed just to the southwest of the 25-acre Nike Park. City officials recently signed off on annexing about 20 acres that the Park District will use for a major expansion of Nike Park, which sits on land that from 1956 to 1963 housed a Cold War-era Army missile battery.
In addition to the lighted artificial turf field, the improvements will involve adding a multi-use grass field, a 2,500-square-foot support building and a practice field that also will be used for water detention and also for cricket matches. And by combining the new land with the existing Nike Park, the Park District will enjoy greater flexibility, allowing enough space for an additional multi-use grass field. As a result, the overall park now will have six large athletic fields, 12 sport courts, a ballfield hub, a playground and a bike trail.
In total, the added land will allow for a net addition of four new fields, which Park District staff and residents alike call long overdue in the largely built-out northern Naperville.
Naperville North High School student Joe Sullivan, who plays for the traveling Galaxy Soccer Club, said he welcomes the new lighted artificial turf field.
“We’ve had a lot of rainouts lately, and we haven’t really had any fields that you can play on when it’s raining or after it’s rained,” Sullivan said. “Because Naperville has so many traveling soccer teams playing in it, it’s already so hard to schedule games. Now that we’ve got these new fields to play on, we’ll be able to get in a lot more games, and it’ll be a lot easier to reschedule games to play other teams as well.”
Sullivan, who also plays on Naperville North’s junior varsity soccer team, said he has played soccer in Naperville since the age of 7. The times he’s played on artificial turf over the years have been great, he said.
“The synthetic turf allows you to get great bounces,” he said. “You always know where the ball’s going to be.”
In 2007, the Park District bought the new parcel at 1520 N. Mill St. from developer B.C.T. LLC for $8 million. The new land and Nike Park together consisted of more than 100 single-family lots laid out in 1926 as part of the never-built Naper Villa Manor subdivision. As part of the city’s approval, Naperville will vacate the unbuilt Pearson Street, 46th Street, Byerrum Street and 47th Street public road rights-of-way inside the 20-acre parcel, which will allow the park district to consolidate all of its land into one.
The pact between the city and the Park District also will bring a new bike path along Mill Street and new left-turn lanes at the corner of Mill Street and Commons Road. The city will contribute $100,000 toward the bike path, while the Park District will pay 23 percent of the new turn lanes’ cost.
“The plan … is the result of nearly four years of collaborative engineering between the neighbors, the city and the county,” said Park District attorney Derke Price, who labeled the various agreements that different agencies had to hammer out something of a “Rubik’s cube.”
“Even the state of Illinois has had their say, and the U.S. Department of Defense has weighed in, since we are not allowed to give the city the easements it normally requires without getting approval from the Department of Defense.”
Last fall, the Park District cleared the then-heavily wooded property in anticipation of the park improvements, which are expected to begin this summer and finish next year.
In the meantime, parks officials, city officials and soccer enthusiasts alike have said they’re thrilled to watch the new fields take shape.
“We’re really excited about this,” said Brad Wilson, the Park District’s director of recreation. “This will be a nice addition not just to that park but to the northern portion of the community, which is really deficient in fields.”
And Plant said he in particular is very much looking forward to being able to play on artificial turf and under lights.
“Sure, artificial turf will be a little more slippery, but the field can’t be destroyed, and you can play all the time, so it’s really nice,” he said. “And it’ll be nice to have a lighted field so we can play some games later in the evenings.”
