Eugene weekly., January 15, 2015, Page 13, Image 13

What additions are needed to create a
successful soccer stadium?
Greg Ausland from the Ausland Group has looked at
this, and he’s been involved in restoring over 30 of the
historic covered bridges in the state. It turns out they
are very similar to grandstands in construction. He did a
thorough analysis of the structure of Civic Stadium and
found only two out of 360 columns need to be replaced.
The lower bleachers themselves have been exposed to the
weather, so they need to be replaced, but the uppers are
fine. The roof needs to be replaced as soon as possible,
and Friends of Civic Stadium already has the money to do
that in its escrow account. We’d need to replace half of the
bleacher boards, give it new siding, a little bit of seismic
retrofit, and then we’re ready to use it again.
looking for nice places to live, and this would certainly fall
in line as a good amenity.
In addition to that, the nice, central location of Eugene
between Portland and Southern Oregon would make
the stadium a perfect place to host high-school playoff
games in addition to major tournaments. With the fields
at Amazon Park and South Eugene High School so close,
bringing Civic Stadium back online as a usable field
means we could host really big soccer tournaments, which
can bring thousands of visitors for long weekends. Right
now, we don’t have the ability to do that. Even smaller
cities like Medford and Redding host huge tournaments.
For Eugene to do that, bringing Civic back would be a
huge factor.
‘I THINK IT WOULD CREATE THAT
NEIGHBORHOOD GAME-DAY EXPERIENCE.’
— DAVE GALAS, LANE UNITED
It’s ugly, I’ll give you that. In its current state, it’s an
eyesore. But underneath all that, it’s 95 percent structurally
sound. So we’d do a whole bunch of cosmetic stuff to fix it,
but only a tiny bit of structural work is needed.
Do you see this as a possible economic driver?
I think it could be an economic engine run. That game-
day experience in particular is big, to have something of
our own that’s not related to the university. It would be a
team people can get behind regardless of where they went
to school — not just a Ducks thing. Soccer is really popular,
especially for the younger demographic. Millennials are
How does Civic Stadium play a part in Lane
United getting to the next professional level?
We’re hoping to reach USL-Pro League, and right now
we’re USL PDL [Premier Development League], which is
semi-pro. USL Pro has a seating capacity requirement of
at least 5,000 seats. So, basically, we can’t get there yet
because there’s currently nowhere for us to play.
What’s coming up for Lane United this year?
We set our schedule for this coming season, which should
be released in the next couple of weeks, and the season-ticket
launch party at Oakshire Public House should be coming up at
the end of this month. Then we will be off to Spain for some
tryouts, where we hope to find a handful of players to bring
back, and we’ll hold open tryouts here in town right around
spring break. The season starts the first week of May.
What will the team look like?
We had a really good relationship with Oregon State
University this past season, and that will continue. By
league rules, we can only have a maximum of five players
from any one university, so we plan on filling those spots
from Oregon State. We’ll also be recruiting nationally and
internationally. As we did last season, we’ll play a handful
of players from local tryouts, as well.
What are the advantages of having a home
soccer stadium in Eugene?
First off, I think Willamalane has been great to deal
with as an organization. They’ve been really supportive
and continue to be supportive going forward in trying to
make the game-day experience that much better for the
fans. That being said, their location is a little bit remote,
and I know that hurts our attendance. People don’t just
go out there on a whim. They have to plan for it. In the
Emeralds days, people would just go to a game because it
was happening and happened to be close.
I think it would definitely help attendance, but I would
still want to pull from all over the area and work with LTD to
make it easily accessible to people all over. We certainly are
not into it being a Eugene-versus-Springfield thing, but the
Civic location has such good walkability to shops and bars,
and right up Willamette is the university and downtown —
it’s really centrally located for all kinds of post-game activity.
I think it would create that neighborhood game-day
experience, much like they have in Portland [Portland
Timbers stadium Providence Park, formerly Jeld-Wen
Field], where people flood the streets and walk around.
That kind of experience isn’t possible at Willamalane. But
it’s possible at Civic Stadium. ■
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