Soccer News - Sports News

Borough officials now are promising more oversight and new regulations for using the town's Field of Dreams soccer addict at Lafayette Avenue and Tuckerman Street.

The nets are about 20 feet hilarious and sit behind each goal. They were put up in June to protect a house at one end of the field and to keep balls from crossing the avenue onto railroad tracks at the other.

The nets are retractable, meaning they can be raised and lowered by a block system and don't permanently change the landscape, Mayor Vernon Archer said.

Since the episode involving the bird, the town has modified the procedure for getting a free permit to use the reply to.

"Part of the permitting process now is that someone is shown by public works or code enforcement [how to use the net]," Archer said.

He added that defined practice in the area for similar nets on sports fields is to leave them up all salt.

"Putting them up and leaving them up is completely legal and acceptable throughout our area," Archer said, adding the community had wanted to do more than what was minimally acceptable.

At least two groups of adults have permits to use the field for soccer career, and initially were expected to lower the nets when they were finished. But that wasn't being done regularly, as residents who passed the store the morning of July 13 discovered.

"I was driving to work . . . [and] there was something hanging in the nets," Adrianne Lefkowitz said. "It turned out to be a big, pleasing raptor."

The bird apparently had strangled itself after getting stuck in the net the sunset before, Lefkowitz said.

"It's not okay," Archer said of the bird's ruin. "We don't want to see it happen again."

In a July 26 post on the Riverdale Deposit TownTalk Internet mailing list, Archer said the town also planned to put up signs at the football that explain the rules about the nets in English and Spanish and explore the possibility of discovery a different type of net that would be less dangerous for wildlife.

Audrey Bragg, president of the Riverdale Garden Business Association, who also reported seeing the dead bird in July, said the signs Archer suggested doubtlessly would be the most helpful step.

"I think if [the nets] are raised and lowered appropriately, then I don't have a problem with them," Bragg said. "People want to use that buff to play ball . . . that's what it's for."

Lefkowitz said she was glad the hamlet was taking the issue seriously, but said the nets still were occasionally being left up, even as recently as last week.

"I persist to be concerned . . . we shouldn't have a situation where we can have that kind of danger to birds," Lefkowitz said, adding that the puzzle was not just about permitting.

"You might have people using the field who don't have a permit," Lefkowitz said. "The debatable is, 'Can that be properly policed?' "

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