The Oak Park-River Forest Strikers soccer club enthusiastically supports lighting the stadium, which will do a lot to ease the chronic field space shortage for kids in our community.
Many people don’t realize how fast soccer is growing. Strikers now has 446 boys and girls, age 7 through 18, playing on 30 teams, more than double the numbers from just five years ago. Soccer is a great game for fitness and health–a player typically runs 3 to 5 miles during a game. With 22 players on a small green patch during one game, that’s almost 100 miles of running in about an hour!
The number of kids who are able to play soccer and the playing time available to them in our town are too low. Currently, our club has to rent field space in Westchester, River Grove and Forest Park for Oak Park kids to play their so-called “home” soccer games.
Lights at OPRF would allow high school teams that currently practice and play games at Taylor and Lindberg parks to return to the high school, freeing up fields for AYSO and Strikers players. It would put a lot of smiles on those kids’ faces if we could get the lights approved!
John Donley
Strikers president
