Grande Prairie Soccer Centre. Photo Credit: Shane Clausing

By Shane Clausing

A pitch for a pitch

Swan City FC pitches for new indoor pitch to Grande Prairie City Council

Sep 23, 2020 | 5:30 AM

The Swan City Football Club, formerly known as the Grande Prairie Soccer Association, pitched an idea for a new indoor soccer field to Grande Prairie City Council on Monday. The proposed new multi-sport facility would ideally be located in the Smith Subdivision, behind the Rotary soccer fields.

Currently, there are two indoor soccer facilities located in the Grande Prairie area. The Grande Prairie soccer centre has been around for over 20 years and the Crosslink County Sportsplex has an indoor facility used for various different sports, including soccer.

“When we talked about a new centre, its not just for soccer, its hopefully a multisport, year-round facility that would allow us to have a number of user groups in it, including rugby, lacrosse and hopefully soccer,” explained Derek Van Tassell the President of the Swan City Football Club.

“I think the community needs it. If you look around the province, a lot of the actual indoor soccer facilities are being converted or changed from boarded to non-boarded facilities. We thought the city could use something, kind of like the County Sportsplex, but kind of with a different design that more user groups could utilize.”

No final design on what a future soccer centre would look like has been set, as Monday’s presentation to council was the initial stage of bringing such a concept to the table.

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However, Van Tassell says that a potential design could be something similar to the Edmonton Scottish Society Soccer Dome.

“Hopefully, it’ll look like the County Sportsplex, but with different dimensions. The indoor facility would typically contain one very big field. The dimensions are set-up so you could actually break it up into quarters. So, you can have a number of different user groups using it at the same time. There’s a chance more people can utilize it and more revenue can be generated.”

According to Van Tassell, the Edmonton Scottish Society Soccer Dome cost $7 million to build and is 135,000 square feet in size. That field also had help for funding from the City of Edmonton.

Van Tassel says if approved, he doesn’t expect city council to foot the full bill for the project.

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask the city to carry the full load. Our plan is to hopefully get a location, do some fundraising, corporate sponsorship and reach out not only to the city, but the county and the province to see if we could get some additional funds to go towards the construction.”

While discussions will continue regarding the new soccer centre, a new facility like this would be big for Grande Prairie and its 1,000 plus soccer players.

“I think it’s a benefit to the community and each user group. New facilities obviously allow us to attract more players, more coaches, teams, and groups from outside of the community and overall, the goal is to develop the community through sport.”

City Council moved for administration to connect with Swan City FC to bring forward options for Council to discuss at budget deliberations for the City’s possible contribution.