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Just days before Grant High School’s sports teams were scheduled to start fall training, they got bad news: Some of them wouldn’t have a field to practice on.
“Dear Grant community,” principal James McGee wrote Aug. 16. “I write with some disappointing news: we will not be able to use the Grant Bowl for our fall sports. Last Thursday, the field failed a critical impact safety test.…I know many will be frustrated by this news, but we also cannot risk a possible injury to any of our student athletes.”
The field, made of artificial turf, was too hard because the crumbs of recycled tires that pad the playing surface had compacted. Getting tackled on it could cause a head injury.
Now, student teams are hustling to find other venues. The football team will play home games at the old Marshall High School, 6 miles away. Women’s soccer will schlep to Delta Park, also a 6-mile drive. Practice schedules are up in the air.
Parents say they understand that things go wrong and fields need repair—this one is 10 years old, which is about how long a recycled rubber field lasts. What they don’t understand is why they have to scramble. Unlike most other school fields, Grant’s is owned and maintained by Portland Parks & Recreation, not Portland Public Schools. Why, parents ask, are they only hearing about this now?
“We found out the day before our official practices started,” says Stephanie Antipov, president of Friends of Grant Football, the team’s booster club. Her son, a sophomore, plays cornerback on the varsity squad. “It caught us all off guard.”
Local politicians are pissed off, too. “It’s extremely disappointing to get this news with no time to course correct,” says Portland School Board member Julia Brim-Edwards, who was elected to the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners last May.
The literal turf battle is the latest in a long war over Grant’s athletic fields. In a remodel of the school that began in 2017, the district planned to build a new turf field for the men’s baseball team and have the women’s softball team practice on the dirt at Wilshire Park. Softball coach Debbie Engelstad had to sue Portland Public Schools to get the district to build a new field for her team.
A fight with neighbors over stray light and noise has kept the school from installing lights and stands at Grant Bowl, making it the only school of its size in the state where games must be played in daylight and spectators sit on dirt berms that surround the field.
Almost everyone agrees on a solution to the latest setback: Portland Parks & Recreation should turn the field over to PPS. Kim McGair, parent of a senior on the women’s soccer team, helped start the Grant Bowl Community Coalition. The group polled parents about solutions for the aging bowl and received more than 1,000 responses. Some 99% favor the school district taking ownership or signing a long-term lease.
McGair and others say PPS must be given control of Grant Bowl because PP&R bungled the maintenance so badly. Parents spent years raising money to build the new field and track. The parks bureau kicked in just $400,000 of the $1.7 million budget, even though it owns the property. The city was supposed to be the steward of the field, but the bureau didn’t plan for a replacement after about 10 years, the lifespan of these things, McGair says.
Records first obtained by The Oregonian show the parks bureau has been testing the turf since November, when it got a failing grade from an independent contractor. Attempts to fix it didn’t work, and the field failed again in May.
Parks spokesman Mark Ross says the bureau has been in “constant communication” with PPS about the problem, but didn’t notify Commissioner Dan Ryan, who oversees parks, because “the bureau hoped the commissioner’s involvement wouldn’t be necessary.”
In an Aug. 12 release announcing the closure, the bureau blamed budget shortfalls, noting it had a $600 million maintenance backlog and that one in five park facilities would fail in the next 15 years without more money. As WW reported last month, the city has expanded its parklands despite lacking the funds to maintain current facilities (“Grand Canyon,” July 12).
Now the results of that gap are hitting the people least likely to quietly acquiesce: sports parents.
On Monday, the bureau put out a three-paragraph description of its repair plan, and it appeased no one. Commissioner Ryan and School Board chair Gary Hollands said they had committed to replacing the artificial turf field in time for fall sports in—wait for it—2024. In the meantime, the parks bureau and PPS would work together to find fields for Grant’s athletes.
Antipov, parent of the cornerback, says she wants more details. Where is the funding coming from? Will PPS get a long-term lease on the field? Only two portions of the field are too hard, she says. Has the parks bureau looked into softening those up for this year?
“I think the community is owed actual answers,” she says. “This looks like a tactic to make the community believe the problem is solved when in reality it isn’t.”
GRANT BOWL
Address: 3301-3499 NE US Grant Place
Owner: Portland Parks & Recreation
Year refurbished: 2013
Cost of improvements: $1.7 million
Funders: Ndamukong Suh ($250,000), Nike ($350,000), Friends of Grant Athletics ($317,000), Portland Public Schools ($392,000), Portland Parks & Recreation ($400,000).
Lifespan of new turf on field: 8 to 10 years
