Destroyed athletic facilities leave local sports leagues searching for new homes

One word keeps coming up as people describe damage at the City of Asheville’s riverfront sports venues: catastrophic.

When Tropical Storm Helene hit Sept. 27, massive flooding wreaked havoc on city parks, including Carrier, Azalea, French Broad and Recreation. The floodwaters destroyed playgrounds, restrooms, concession stands and more.

The storm also decimated many of the city’s most-used outdoor athletic facilities. That includes Azalea Park’s John B. Lewis Soccer Complex (JBL) as well as Carrier Park’s in-line hockey rink, lawn bowling green and fields used for softball, rugby, grass volleyball and more.

“There’s not much left that is going to be usable or reopenable in the near future,” says Pete Wall, the city’s assistant director of parks and recreation.

The venues were home to city-run recreation programs as well as sports events organized by groups like the Asheville Buncombe Youth Soccer Association (ABYSA) and the Asheville Hockey League (AHL). Dozens of games and matches have been canceled or rescheduled, and organizers have scrambled to find alternate sites at schools and churches and in nearby communities.

Additionally, tens of thousands of dollars worth of athletic equipment, uniforms and gear was lost, causing some of the sports organizations to set up GoFundMe fundraisers and seek help from outside groups to try to ease the financial burden.

The city’s recreation centers have reopened, but the riverside parks remain closed, and officials don’t know when — or if — the athletic facilities will be repaired and restored. Some of the groups that use the venues aren’t sure it even makes sense to rebuild expensive playing surfaces in a floodplain.

“There’s going to be some finite amount of money for repairing things,” says Michael Rottjakob, ABYSA’s executive director. “And we don’t know exactly where parks are going to fall in terms of priorities. I think it’s going to still be a little while before we have some answers about whether rebuilding soccer fields at that location [Azalea Park] makes sense.”

The city likely won’t make any decisions about repairing and rebuilding until next year, Wall says. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has to inspect and document the damage before officials can even estimate the price tag or know how much federal reimbursement money will be coming.

That process may last into January, he says.

‘Ground zero’

The Lewis soccer complex, which opened in 2005, featured four artificial turf fields managed by the ABYSA. Along with the Buncombe County Sports Park, it served as home to youth and adult recreation leagues, travel teams, summer camps, showcase events, travel tournaments and more. It also hosted events in other sports like lacrosse and ultimate Frisbee.

The Lewis complex “was pretty much ground zero” for Helene-related destruction, Rottjakob says.

Floodwaters rose to the ceiling of the concession stand, which was built outside the 500-year floodplain, he says. The fields were covered with silt, garbage and even old cars.

“We lost 48 soccer goals,” he adds. “We’ve been able to recover some parts from some of the goals, but they were mangled and look like tumbleweed.”

At the time the flooding hit, 4,738 players were registered for ABYSA’s fall programs, which range from beginner rec leagues to competitive travel teams. Additionally, the Asheville Buncombe Adult Soccer Association had more than 1,400 people participating in its fall leagues.

While many youth matches were canceled in October and the adult league scrapped its remaining fall schedule, ABYSA was able to get back to its full slate of rec league games starting the weekend of Nov. 2, Rottjakob says.

Games were played at 12 different locations, rather than the four or five normally required. That included the Buncombe County Sports Park, which remains open, as well as sites provided by Buncombe County Schools, private schools and nearby communities like Mills River.

“We’ve not been able to provide programming in exactly the ways that we have in the past, but we are doing everything we can to serve the soccer community,” Rottjakob says.

The Lewis complex and the Buncombe County Sports Park draw several travel tournaments to town each year. Most of the 2024 events had occurred before Sept. 27, but ABYSA had to cancel the Riverside Senior Girls Showcase, which was scheduled for Nov. 16-17. And officials are looking for alternative sites for two upcoming events, the boys Riverside Spring Kickoff, which takes place in January, and the girls Riverside Spring Kickoff, set for February.

Rottjakob says much of the JBL infrastructure, including the light poles and the curbing that goes around the artificial turf on the fields, is intact. Even so, getting the fields back to playable will be a big undertaking.

Given that the complex had to close for an extended period following flooding in 2018, Rottjakob says the idea of relocating has to be on the table.

“There’s a lot of parties interested in rebuilding the John B. Lewis Soccer Complex, either where it is or finding another location because we have a very large and vibrant soccer community that needs to play,” he says.

Looking for routines

News of damage to Carrier Park’s in-line hockey rink reached all the way to the National Hockey League.

In October, the Raleigh-based Carolina Hurricanes Foundation donated $50,000 to the AHL to help rebuild the rink, which first opened about two decades ago inside the park’s velodrome track. The team gave another $25,000 after the AHL’s GoFundMe hit $25,000 in public donations, getting the group to $100,000 in total.

“What the Hurricanes did, we never could have expected that,” says Dan Dean, AHL vice president and adult commissioner. “For them to come through like that is just amazing.”

In-line hockey, also called roller hockey, is a variant of hockey played on a hard, smooth surface, with players using in-line skates and ice hockey sticks. The AHL runs youth leagues in the fall and spring and adult leagues in the fall, summer and spring. The youth leagues typically have 110-135 participants while the adult league is capped at 166 with a waiting list.

“We are actively on that rink seven days a week,” Dean says. “It is filled pretty much from 6 p.m. until 10:15 at night.”

Damage at the rink was extensive. Several inches of mud covered the playing surface, while the aluminum support piping on half the rink snapped. A trailer crashed into the scoreboard, which will have to be replaced, and a tree fell onto the fencing surrounding the facility. One of the bleachers floated to the nearby lawn bowling green.

In addition, the building the league used for storage flooded.

“We lost a bunch of youth gear, we lost devices to run the scoreboard,” Dean says. “The building’s a total loss. They don’t really know when we will have access to the rink again or when it will be repaired because they’re waiting on FEMA.”

The Pavilion Recreation Complex, more than an hour away in Greenville, S.C., allowed the league to rent its indoor roller hockey rink at a significant discount, Dean says. The AHL was able to salvage some of its fall season by scheduling youth games on Saturdays and adult games on Sundays.

Some of the money donated by the Hurricanes was used to pay for rink time at the Greenville facility.

The league is planning its first winter season for adults in Greenville and may set up a few dates for youth participants as well. But for the spring schedule, which starts in March, it is hoping to secure a location in Asheville. The league owns a rink and hopes it can find an indoor spot, perhaps a metal warehouse or something similar, to set it up.

“As much as we’d like the timeline of the city to be faster, we don’t really want to wait around,” Dean says. “If we don’t find a place we can afford by the end of January, maybe February, we’re going to have to make a decision on what our next steps are. Is it to have another season in Greenville? From here on out, there are no easy decisions.”

AHL President Anthony Cerrato says the league has long desired an indoor facility that it has more control over and that isn’t affected by the weather. The Carrier Park rink is also used for lacrosse, soccer and roller derby practices as well as city-run roller-skating events and more.

An indoor rink also could allow the league to host travel tournaments, bringing in teams from Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, Cerrato says.

“We’ve had a great partnership with the city, and we want to continue that, but I just don’t know if they’re going to open up that park again,” he says. “The long and short of it is we need an indoor rink that’s more stable for the league.”

Fields awash

Among the other Carrier Park playing surfaces damaged by Helene were the court used by the Asheville Lawn Bowling Club and Richard Curenton Field, home of the Asheville Rugby Football Club’s men’s and women’s teams.

The lawn bowling green has been at Carrier Park since it opened in 1998, but it was significantly upgraded as part of park improvements in 2018. The artificial surface that was installed then was designed by an Australian company to world-class standards, says Terry Reincke, president of Asheville Lawn Bowling Club.

“We hosted a couple of tournaments in the last couple of years, and countless numbers of people say to us, ‘You have the best lawn bowling green in America,'” he says.

While lawn bowling is not particularly well-known in the United States, Asheville has had an active community, mostly among retirees, since the 1990s. In the game, players try to roll their ball (called a bowl) closest to a smaller ball to score points. The Asheville club has 105 members, a number that soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as people were looking for outdoor activities, Reincke says.

But like the other playing fields, the future of the lawn bowling green is in doubt.

“I don’t think the carpet could be salvaged,” Reincke says. “My guesstimate is it’s probably a $175,000 project to bring it back to where it was. So it’ll be a question of whether the city is willing to make that kind of investment or not.”

The Asheville Rugby Football Club (ARFC) uses Curenton Field, in the westernmost part of Carrier Park, for practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays and games on Saturdays. The field is also used for lacrosse, grass volleyball and other sports. The women’s rugby team splits its home matches between Asheville and Greenville.

The field was covered with sediment as well as debris from a nearby RV park and rendered unplayable. And the club suffered major losses when an equipment shed it leases from the RV park was destroyed.

“That had all of our practice gear, all of our game day supplies, all of our jerseys, roping shields,  etc.,” says club President Kyle Peterson. “That got washed somewhere downstream. It was probably $15,000 or $20,000 worth of stuff.”

Asheville Parks & Rec officials are hoping to secure practice time for the club at city-owned Roger Farmer Park, which has lights and a decent amount of room. But the club still will need to find a spot to host matches.

The Asheville club is a member of USA Rugby, and the men’s and women’s teams compete in the Carolinas Rugby Geographical Union against teams in Charlotte, Gastonia, Raleigh and other cities. The men’s team had to cancel four fall matches after Helene hit. It may be able to make up some of those in the spring, but some will likely have to be forfeited, Peterson says.

The Charlotte, Gastonia and Greenville, S.C., clubs have offered the use of their pitches for spring makeup games, he says. Using the field at Cane Creek Middle School in Fletcher is another possibility, he adds.

“The goal is to be back up and running in some form or fashion for the spring portion of our season,” he says.

Flood prep

When the time comes, the city will consider ways to make fields and structures at the parks more resilient to flooding, says Wall, the assistant parks and recreation director. As an example, he points to the restroom facility and picnic pavilion at French Broad River Park.

“While they have tons of debris and mud, they were designed to withstand a flood of this magnitude,” he explains. “So we’re hopeful that when we can get in there and get the debris cleared off, those buildings will have sustained only minor to moderate damage.”

The restroom structure at Carrier Park, by contrast, wasn’t designed to withstand a flood and sustained heavy damage, he says.

“If we go back in there with an additional restroom building or any of these other park facilities, hopefully, the goal would be to design them in such a way that they could withstand the flooding,” he says.

Like many other cities, Asheville has traditionally considered greenways, parks and open space in floodplains as preferable to having occupied buildings like houses and offices in those spots.

“Those things are opportunities to build in the floodplain and not have a negative or adverse impact, hopefully,” he explains. “For the last hundred years, it’s proved to be a pretty viable opportunity to create open space. But certainly in a flood of this magnitude, that’s not always the case. [Flood mitigation] will go into our planning for the future.”