One line made all the difference. When the Vancouver Whitecaps announced earlier this month they were creating a soccer centre at UBC, I figured they must have sweetened the deal that had been on the table out here. And sure enough they had.
Vancouver's professional soccer team had originally looked at building the National Soccer Training Centre at John Oliver Park in East Delta, going as far as signing a memorandum of understanding with the municipality, however the two sides couldn't put the final touches on the agreement.
The sticking point was community access. There wasn't much of it.
There were different configurations thrown around, but the Whitecaps essentially wanted almost exclusive access to a significant portion of what's a public park, leaving local users with just a couple of fields.
Thankfully civic officials weren't blinded by the prestige of playing host to the best soccer players in the country and stood firm on the belief that parks should be for the people who live there. After much negotiation, the deal went south and the Whitecaps, with a big chunk of provincial government money in tow, started looking elsewhere.
That elsewhere turned out to be UBC where a complex, which will include five fields and what's being called a state-ofthe-art fieldhouse, will ring in just north of $30 million.
The amenities are certainly impressive, but the key part of the deal, at least how I see it, is summed up by a sentence in the third paragraph of the press release announcing the project: "The centre will be a significant community asset, with more than 50 per cent of field time devoted to community use."
I'm not sure if the Whitecaps wised up after the John Oliver deal fell through or whether they made the same pitch somewhere else to no avail, but eventually they figured it out. It's one thing to demand exclusive use if you own the land, but if you're sharing a public park, you better make sure you're able to accommodate the public.
It's left for conjecture whether the East Delta project would have become reality if the Whitecaps had agreed to devote "more than 50 per cent" of the field time for community use. Given the upgrades they would have made to the park, it might well have been enough to satisfy municipal leaders.
We'll never know the answer to that one, but I think Delta was right to stick to its guns. The soccer centre would have been a nice amenity, but the price being asked was just too high.
