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Football comes home to St. Albert

Local footballers rejoice — home games will finally be played in St. Albert when washroom and change room facilities open at Riel Recreation Park later this summer.

Local footballers rejoice — home games will finally be played in St. Albert when washroom and change room facilities open at Riel Recreation Park later this summer.

On Monday, city staff notified council that portable facilities would be placed at the park until permanent ones are finished sometime in the next two years. That means the city’s high school football teams will be able to play home games in St. Albert for the first time, a prospect that has proponents of the game excited.

“Finally, after all these years of St. Albert high school [football] the juniors and the seniors will have home games which we’ve never been able to do,” said Norm St. Arnaud, director of facilities with the St. Albert Minor Football Association.

The city hopes to have the facilities working by July 31, and they include four trailers that will house three change rooms, including one for referees, and washrooms.

Up until now, the league wouldn’t allow St. Albert’s high school football teams to play home games in the city because they lacked the proper change facilities and scoreboards.

The football association has since paid for a scoreboard that’s now in place at the field, and St. Arnaud said the city and the association would share the costs of the temporary facilities.

“We’re very pleased that it has progressed to where it is now, the city has been very cooperative with us,” he said.

But permanent facilities are still a few years away.

Last year, the city agreed to pitch in $445,000 for public washrooms as a part of the $12.8-million budget for phase one of the park, which includes capping and grading the former landfill, plus a multi-use sports field and the Kinsmen RV park.

According to Monique St. Louis, the city’s director of recreation services, that money will be used to design and build a shared washroom/change room facility. The football association could pick up any additional funding shortfalls.

St. Arnaud couldn’t confirm if that was the case.

“We will consider it at the time and see what our contribution can be if it all possible, but we’re putting in quite a few dollars already at this point and we’re a pretty small association,” explained St. Arnaud.

In the meantime, St. Louis said she’s excited to move toward phases two, three and four of the park and continue working with the local groups that helped make phase one possible.

“We learned a lot from phase one,” St. Louis said. “It’s all come off quite fantastic, it’s just taken a lot of effort from our stakeholders and from our engineering folks to pull it off.”

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