Soccer loses out to baseball at Jones Park; upset Latinos will see new soccer venues in coming Time Check ‘greenway’

CEDAR RAPIDS – Jones Park is a sprawling jewel of a spot, a last place to expect a spat tainted by a charge of discrimination over how City Hall invests in its recreational venues.

A stop at the southwest Cedar Rapids location over lunch last week revealed the cause of the friction:

The park's remaining regulation soccer field was packed with players, young adults to middle-agers, and most of Latino descent. Beyond the field was what had been the park's second large soccer field, which is in the process of being converted into a baseball field at a cost of $150,000, most of which is coming from grants and donations.

“They are taking city property that belongs to the public and not to baseball enthusiasts,” complains Marcelino Hivento, a longtime Cedar Rapidian of Bolivian descent. “That's where it becomes controversial – It's discrimination of sports. It's discrimination against Latinos.”

Hivento – the director of the Latin America Museum and Cultural Center, which is part concept and part reality - says the two large Jones Park soccer fields (there's also an additional small area) were the prime “inner-city” soccer fields used by the local Latino community, which numbers about 300 families, he says. The city's Tuma soccer complex on the far north edge of the city is too far away, he says.

Hivento thinks Julie Sina, the city's parks and recreation director, should have steered those who want more baseball fields to some other location, a position he shared with the City Council earlier this month.

“If they know those are the only soccer fields that Latinos use, they could have said, ‘We can't put it there. People of Latin American culture use that one,'” he says.

For her part, Sina says of Hivento, “He's very passionate, and I can't fault him for that.”

However, she says Hivento is wrong when he suggests that she is discriminating against Latinos because the city is converting a Jones Park soccer field into a baseball field.

“I don't care if you're purple,” Sina says. “(Alleging discrimination) is not a fair assessment. We do a lot with many, many people.”

In recent years, the greatest number of requests to the city for additional facilities has come from the local baseball community, Sina says. And she adds, the baseball community brought their own money to the city to help support its case. Money doesn't mean everything, but it can mean something, she says.

The new $150,000 baseball field in Jones Park is funded by a $75,000 Baseball Tomorrow grant, $50,000 in funds from the Cedar Rapids Kernels, the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation and private citizens, and $25,000 worth of in-kind services like grading from the city.

The new baseball field, she says, will bring the total number of ball diamonds in Jones Park to three, which will create a mini-complex of fields that will allow for more tournaments and more youth programs. With three fields, parents with a couple of baseball players of different ages likely will be able to see them both play in Jones Park rather than having to run from one part of town to another.

Hivento, 59, came to Cedar Rapids in 1976 and spent some years coaching soccer here. He says the local Latino community consists of those from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and other nations, and most play soccer, not baseball, though baseball, routinely called America's Pastime, is popular in several Latin American spots.

“Soccer is in every country of the world,” Hivento says. “Besides, soccer is a good sport, it gives good flexibility to the body and mind. Baseball is boring to me. You just sit in one place.”

Homer Screws, men's and women's soccer coach at Coe College and women's soccer coach at Kennedy High School, says he sometimes has to take his players to Robins to find a place to practice because of a lack of practice fields in Cedar Rapids. The city needs soccer and baseball fields, Screws says.

Sina is asking soccer players to hang in there.

The pace of buyouts and demolitions of flood-wrecked homes in the Time Check Neighborhood is picking up now, a move designed to turn the flood-prone blocks along the Cedar River into a “greenway” that won't be damaged if it floods.

Sina says the rules of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is paying most of the cost of the greenway buyouts, don't permit permanent structures to be erected in the greenway. That means no baseball fences, dugouts or backstops.

Instead, the city's plan is to convert the riverfront area into fields for soccer, rugby, kite-flying and other uses.

“By the end of 2011, if all the pieces work together, we'll have soccer fields ready for play,” Sina says. “ … I'm here to make the community better, and not to take away from anybody. We're planning for the future, and we're going to end up with much better than before.”

Hivento says he needed to see the proposed layout of the fields first. Will they be so narrow that soccer balls will end up in the river? he wondered.

At the same time, he admits the spot could be a good one for soccer, close to the center of the city and likely to be close to parking and rest room facilities.

“I don't know until I see the maps,” he says. “Then maybe I can agree.”