Year-round recreational facility could be headed to Canton

Thanks to the vision of five local businessmen who also happen to love sports, the town of Canton could soon have another multi-purpose recreational facility that would be available for use 12 months out of the year.

The five partners, organized as 02 Realty Holding Company, LLC, recently received a green light from the Zoning Board of Appeals to build a set of playing fields on a 7.5-acre site at the rear of 925 and 955 Turnpike Street (Route 138), behind the new Prestige Car Wash and across the street from Turnpike Café. The fields will be built using “state of the art synthetic turf and drainage systems,” and will be covered with an inflated air structure, or “sports bubble,” from late October to early April.

While a construction timeline for the new facility has not yet been established, local attorney Paul Schneiders said the group is “100 percent committed” to the project and eager to get started.

“These people are very, very serious about it and put a great deal of time and money into this project,” said Schneiders, who described them all as “successful business owners” as well as “very dedicated coaches, league founders, and parents.”

The 02 Realty team, whose name is short for “Outdoor second season,” consists of the following five principals: real estate developer Thomas Niles of Needham; marketing and branding expert Ed Foster of Medfield; Bruce Balder of Needham, owner of Stoughton-based International Metal Corporation; attorney George Price of Westwood, a former senior special agent with the DEA; and Nick Richio of Cambridge, a former standout soccer player at Babson and a head coach with FC Greater Boston.

Schneiders said the group is united not only by their enthusiasm for sports, but also by their shared belief that “there should be indoor facilities for outdoor sports in the cold and inclement seasons of the year.”

As the 02 team explained in a statement, “The winter season demand for quality indoor athletic fields far exceeds supply. The popularity of soccer, lacrosse, and other sports among children and adults grows each season. Field hockey, softball, baseball, flag football, and many other sports are almost completely preempted from access to regional indoor facilities.”

Schneiders said the new facility would be similar in some ways to the Canton Sportsplex, which is located on Carver Circle, although he stressed that there would be “very limited space for spectator viewing.”

There will, however, be plenty of parking spaces to accommodate parents who drop off and pick up their children, and the zoning board, as part of its approval, stipulated that the owners construct “permanent structures for lavatories and support facilities” within two years.

The fields themselves will be set several hundred feet back and oriented parallel to Turnpike Street, which is a dramatic departure from the group’s original proposal that called for fields perpendicular to the street and set roughly 100 feet back.

Schneiders said the fields would be used “primarily for field-sports, offseason training, and recreation,” although a portion of the facility could at times be used as a golf driving range. The facility would be open seven days a week from 6 a.m. to midnight.

As for the seasonal air structure, it would average 38 feet in height, with a peak height of 76 feet, and would be installed for roughly five months out of the year. Schneiders said that such structures — which are held up by controlled internal air pressure rather than wood or steel supports — are quite common throughout the region and are used by many colleges and professional sports teams, including the Patriots.

Local reaction to the proposed facility, meanwhile, appears to be overwhelmingly positive. Schneiders said the owners plan to work with both the schools and the Recreation Department to provide “some use of the facility for school and town teams,” and CHS Athletic Director Danny Erickson and Recreation Director Jeff Kaylor have both come out in support of the project.

The site itself also seems to be a good fit for a recreational use, having been targeted for this purpose on at least two previous occasions — once by former Celtics guard Dana Barros, who sponsored a “recreational use” bylaw that received near-unanimous approval from town meeting voters, and again by Peter Giambanco in 2006.

Barros, who starred at Xaverian Brothers and then Boston College before playing 13 seasons in the NBA, eventually built his proposed sportsplex in Mansfield, and Giambanco ended up withdrawing his petition in favor of a site in Norwood.

Schneiders does not expect this pattern to continue with the newest owners, although he could not guarantee that the facility would be built, nor does he claim to know much about the group’s financial footing. He pointed to another project that he was involved with — the proposed Brown/Billone Tennis Center on Pine Street — as an example of a supposed “sure thing” that fizzled out after receiving ZBA approval in March 2009.

Nevertheless, Schneiders remains optimistic that 02 Realty will see this project through, in part due to the owners’ enthusiasm, which apparently has not waivered since the facility was first proposed more than a year ago.

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Posted by Jay Turner on Mar 10 2011. Filed under News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.