The Town of Vienna and the surrounding areas of Fairfax County are chronically short of ball fields for organized youth and amateur sports. This is a complaint you’ll hear from anyone tasked with finding field time for practice, let alone for competition. The ball fields around here are pretty well booked up at peak periods.
With the completion of the Town of Vienna’s large new police station, Vienna now has a rare opportunity to add to the stock of public ball fields in town. A few years back, the Town bought the former Baptist Church on Center Street, for $5.5M of your tax dollars. That was used as the temporary police station, as the new police station was built. But now, that 3-acre tract of land — located directly across from existing Waters and Caffi fields — is no longer needed for that purpose.
If you’d be in favor of turning that land into playing fields, you’d better start speaking up right now. Get your preferences known. Because, as sure as night follows day, and as sure as every new building in Vienna will be absolutely as large as the law and the lot allow, if sports advocates don’t get dibs on this plot of land soon, somebody’s going to find an excuse to put a great big taxpayer-financed building on it.
I’d bet money on that.
Dimensions, please.
A U.S. football field is 360′ long and 160′ wide (reference). That’s a fairly big chunk of land in an urban environment, amounting to about 1.2 acres.
Below, you can see a standard football field laid out in the Astroturf outfield of Waters field, in the heart of the Town of Vienna. (You can verify the dimensions using (e.g.) Google Maps). You can also see the now-idle three-acre former Baptist church tract, owned by the Town, directly across the street. You can verify those dimensions using the Fairfax County tax map.
Source: Google Earth, annotations mine.
Just in case it’s not readable, the former Baptist Church lot measures out to be 400′ deep and 325′ wide. There’s probably a bit of ambiguity on the depth, regarding the exact location of the Town right-of-way. So the usable space may exceed that by a bit. But those dimensions are good enough for doing a bit of rough planning.
First, that former Baptist Church tract is a nice size and shape. As a matter of arithmetic, it would be feasible to squeeze in not one, but two full-sized football fields.
Admittedly, that would leave room for just about nothing else. The combined dimensions of two standard U.S. football fields, would be 360′ x 320′. That leaves a total of five feet left over, at the sidelines, and 40 feet, at the end zones. Two football fields would fill the lot from side-to-side, more-or-less lot-line-to-lot line.
So, practically speaking, it would probably be inadvisable to put two full-sized football fields in. But, for sure, one football field would fit. You’d have 20′ of running room past the end of each end zone, and plenty of room for a parking lot on one of sidelines. Likely, you’d put the parking lot adjacent to the existing homes, to put some space between the field and the nearby housing.
Soccer fields for high-school aged kids are about the same size as a football field. So, more-or-less ditto for a standard high-school soccer field.
But soccer fields for younger kids are smaller. For ages 12 and under, a soccer field can be as small as 255′ x 120′ (reference). You could fit a two “youth” soccer fields in there with room to spare. In that configuration, there’d be room for a couple of rows of parking directly adjacent to Center Street.
Finally, baseball and softball fields are a bit more flexible, but I see a recommended length of 275′ for each foul line for a Little League field (reference). So you could put in one Little League baseball diamond and still have plenty of room for (e.g.) a small parking area, perhaps a row of cars along Center and a row adjacent to the nearby housing.
FWIW, under no circumstances would I suggest that these fields be lit, because they are directly adjacent to housing. I’d be thinking more along the lines of a set of low-key daytime-use ball fields. Something more akin to the baseball diamond at Meadow Lane, which sits directly across from single-family homes. And not a clone of the lit-and-Astroturfed Waters Field.
Isn’t fitness one of our town goals?
In any case, I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to convert that land to open green space, in the form of ball fields, before somebody thinks up an alternative use for it. If you think that’s a good use of your tax dollars, you should start talking that up sooner rather than later.
Think of it as the Town’s tangible commitment to youth fitness.
As the Town proceeds with its rezoning, and likely opens the door to a whole lot of new housing along Maple Avenue, it seems like there needs to be some balance to offset all that population growth. Part of the balance needs to be some effort to increase the amount of land available for recreational purposes. And if this particular track of land gets built on, the opportunity to include this green space in an ever-more-crowded Vienna will be lost for good.
