Hopping the fence

Starting in my early middle school years, from about 2005 on, my friends and I often walked a couple of blocks to a park we called Snake Park in the Rockwood neighborhood of Gresham. It’s official name is Vance Park, but since everyone was convinced there were snakes, it was Snake Park to us. (I'm not sure who started this rumor, and I don't recall ever seeing any sort of reptile there.)

Back then, and to this day, Snake Park held an approximately 28,000-square-foot old roller skating rink that was fenced up and prohibited from public use. As teenagers, the fence didn’t stop us from entering. We used the rink as a street soccer court, with a diversity of people stopping by after school to play ball. Most were middle and high school students from the Reynolds and Centennial school districts.   

Fast forward almost 10 years, and the rink is still home to street soccer — only now in a more official capacity. In May 2014 I made a quick visit to the park and couldn’t help notice that people were still jumping the fence to play. That got me thinking. I reached out to my good friend Yesenia Delgado, and together we created a Facebook page. We called it the Rockwood Initiative, and wrote a short post about the big idea of redeveloping the old rink into an accessible futsal court for the community.

Futsal is a form of soccer typically played on a smaller field than soccer, with a smaller ball, usually on an acrylic surface. With Yesenia and I both being residents of Rockwood, we made it clear that our passion and work would focus around the neighborhood and the community. Yesenia was an intern at the time with Active Children Portland, a nonprofit organization focused on the health of children, and I an intern with Multnomah County. By bringing our networks together, we are able to attract some major attention.

By the fall of 2014, we found ourselves in big community meetings, sharing the importance of this project. We believe that sports, in particular soccer, can bring togetherness to a community with a lot of diversity. The vision is to unite residents and help decrease gang activity, violence, drug use and high school/middle school dropout rates. Rockwood is pretty commonly known as the “ghetto." From personal experience, living there means regularly hearing about nearby fights and drug deals, the lack of security in the streets, and the process in which young kids drop out of school in order to join gangs. Not all kids who drop out follow the same path, of course; some need to leave school to provide for their families.

After several meetings about the futsal court, we were able to gain the community’s support and approval. With partners Active Children Portland, Multnomah County and the City of Gresham, we sought grants to help fund the project. In December 2014, we applied for a $15,000 grant from the U.S. Soccer Foundation -- and got it, one month later.

With momentum building, we decided to pitch our idea to the Portland Timbers soccer team and the organizations Operation Pitch Invasion and Fields for All. By April 2015, we had gathered $90,ooo, enough to make our dream come true. The Portland Timbers selected Vance Park futsal as its first fully renovated Fields for All project.

We're excited to announce that construction of the new futsal court has begun. If everything lines up, it will be open and ready for use by the second week of September.  The name "SNAKE Court" — standing for Sports, Neighborhood, Action, Knowledge and Empowerment — draws on community history while representing the values the Rockwood Initiative holds dear. Once the court is built, our goal is to offer programs teaching kids the fundamentals of soccer. Tournaments and leagues will start up, too. 

The Rockwood Initiative hopes to bring a second futsal court to the Gresham area in the next couple of years. Outside resources and great partnerships can change the atmosphere of a struggling area. Rockwood is on the verge of many changes, with positive developments coming step by step to the places that need it most.