The balancing act of providing field space for youth and adult athletics and accommodating a combination of the most competitive of those children (and their parents), as well as out-of-town players on travel and premier squads, has been a tricky one for Newtown Parks & Recreation officials.

Newtown Recreation officials now hope some changes to the field use procedures will make Newtown residents happy while not shutting out nonresidents altogether. They also hope to maximize use of the town’s field space in the process.

Beginning in the spring of 2015, field use will be regulated differently than it has for the past ten-plus years, with stricter rules for out-of-town residents. The Parks & Recreation Commission at its October meeting approved a change in the rules that now requires every team within an organization to meet an 80 percent residency requirement

Additionally, other policy changes are being considered to help ensure there is an equal opportunity for Newtown athletes to have field use. Those changes may be put into place for the spring campaign, according to Assistant Director of Parks Carl Samuelson.

“The goal is to make sure that a Newtown youth who wants to play a recreation sport has equal access to use fields,” Mr Samuelson said.

Until now, only the leagues themselves had to have 80 percent of their team members from Newtown. The result was that some teams consist of more than 80 percent Newtown residents, allowing other teams to have only about half of their rosters comprising Newtown residents.

In September, The Bee received a letter to the editor from Lori Clure, a Newtown parent upset that her 12-year-old daughter was cut during tryouts for a Babe Ruth travel softball team, in which she claimed half of the lineup included out-of-towners. Timothy Adam, president of Newtown Babe Ruth Softball, noted that the program has its own bylaws; in addition to meeting the town’s 80 percent mandate, more than half of the travel roster must include Newtown athletes. The ratio, he noted, can be as close as 7-to-6, as was the case for the team Mrs Clure’s daughter wanted to play on.

He said the Babe Ruth’s recreational team (not affiliated with Newtown Recreation) has a fee of $125 per player, while the Babe Ruth travel program rate is $800. Travel coaches accept a combination of better players and those needed to fill holes in the lineup — pitchers or catchers, if there are already a number of fielders, for example — for the betterment of the team’s overall on-field strength.

“If we create a team that can’t compete we have parents who complain about paying $800, and for what?” Mr Adam notes. “You expect to be competitive.”

Andy Clure, Lori’s husband, claims the team selected had only six players from Newtown for the roster after the tryout and that a seventh was added only after the Clures complained to the league and town officials, and a meeting was held between recreation officials, First Selectman Pat Llodra, and Babe Ruth officials.

Mr Adam insisted that Babe Ruth officials followed their bylaws and noted that all of the Newtown players who did not qualify for the travel team would have been put on a second U12 squad if there were enough to field a team. Part of the issue was that a coach of what would have been a recreational team left the program to establish a travel squad of his own, the Clures said.

Finding Solutions

Mrs Llodra, who has a background in the management side of sports — she had served as assistant executive director for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference — said the advice from recreation officials and her was that the Babe Ruth program needs to be more transparent in its dealings with parents, so that everybody understands the process, and organizations need to find a way to be more inclusive.

“How can the issue be avoided in the future?” was an important question that needed answering, the first selectman commented.

Andy Clure says teams should consist of 100 percent Newtown residents.

“I understand the frustration,” said Mr Samuelson, who acknowledges that taxpayers have every right to want an opportunity for their children to play, but also sees the perspective of parents of athletes on travel teams. Mr Samuelson says priority, however, will continue to be given to Newtown residents and that new rules that may go into place stand to help ensure hometown athletes get more opportunities than they did previously.

For starters, the new rule that travel or premier teams must consist of 80 percent Newtown athletes will result in fewer teams from a given organization, thus opening more field space for more teams, Mr Samuelson said. Instead of four teams in a given age group, there might be just one now, he added.

“I think this is a positive first step toward keeping more Newtown children involved in our town sports,” Lori Clure said after the decision to implement the 80 percent residency regulation for all travel teams.

One challenge will be to verify that rosters comply with the rules. Mr Samuelson said the Recreation Department does not have the staffing to check the applications of thousands of athletes to determine how many Newtown athletes are on a given travel team. A consideration to help make things even more fair for Newtown residents, while also accommodating travel teams, is to adopt a regulation in which a pay-to-play hourly fee structure is implemented for teams that don’t meet the 80 percent threshold for  Newtown athletes, and giving for-profit premier teams that don’t comply with the residency rule a lower scheduling priority, Samuelson suggests.

The commission may vote on these and other new regulations before the start of the spring season.

Parks & Recreation Commission Chairman Ed Marks said that the commission has been talking for some time about refining its old 80 percent policy.

Mr Samuelson belongs to the New England Sports Turf Management Association and has been a part of roundtable discussions and forums with officials from comparable communities including New Canaan, and Massachusetts towns Needham and Wakefield. He said the towns share ideas and adopt regulations that are proven to work.

Mr Samuelson notes that Newtown is not alone. Other towns, he said, have issues with premier teams and recreational squads vying for scarce field space.

New Guidelines

“Over the course of the next year we will likely enact new guidelines that may provide field access based on several tiered levels of residency, but we are still working on these,” said Mr Marks, adding that organizations with teams that do not qualify under the new rules may request a one-year waiver.

Mr Marks notes that residency is not the only requirement to receive access to fields, so organizations may have requested waivers for other reasons in the past. When a waiver request is received, the commission asks the requesting organization to explain why they feel a waiver is warranted and then votes on the matter.

Mr Samuelson is optimistic that the town’s fields will continue to provide space for athletes from both in-house and travel programs, but notes that even with the increase of turf fields allowing games and practices to be scheduled despite rain, there is a field space crunch in town.

“As supportive as we are of our sports groups, we do have a field space issue,” said Samuelson, adding that a growing level of competitiveness is impacting the scheduling.

For example, Newtown Soccer Club teams that in recent seasons switched districts to find better competition brought in a need to follow a new set of standards in which not two, but three field sizes are used depending on age levels. Previously, Newtown officials only had to juggle full field teams and half field teams (enabling them to schedule two younger age group games on one large size field).

Now, a field of new dimensions for other age groups has complicated the scheduling and field maintenance, Mr Samuelson said. The same thing happened with baseball when a third infield size was added to the mix, he said. Mr Samuelson noted that league directors who approved those changes meant well but that “ramifications fell through cracks and we’re trying to clean that up.”