NASTY SPILLOVER FELLS YOUTH FOOTBALL PROGRAM
Leaving Clifford Park to join a JP team
For the second time in three years, the spillover from Mass and Cass has displaced a local Pop Warner football program from practicing at the nearby Clifford Playground.
The Boston Bengals held its last practice at the dilapidated park in Roxbury on Saturday for at least this season, with coordinator Domingos DaRosa linking his remaining players up with the Brookline Jamaica Plain Patriots.
This comes after the two programs merged in 2021, before the Bengals returned to Clifford last year. Much remains the same. Parents have pulled their children from participating after seeing the park’s disorderly setting festered with needles, human feces and other trash littering the 8-acre recreational space.
“It’s just a disappointment to the neighborhood that the city has allowed Mass and Cass to grow, meanwhile it’s killing the community that surrounds the human crisis,” DaRosa told the Herald. “We are creating unseen victims; these kids are unseen.”
Initially, DaRosa said he felt confident that his program would remain at Clifford, as the number of players looked “pretty decent” when practices began Aug. 1. The older age divisions — U10, U12 and U14 — pulled in roughly 16 players, the minimum to field a team, but it didn’t take long for some to drop out due to safety concerns.
Relocating means some children from the immediate neighborhood will be forced to take the T across the city to get to Jamaica Plain’s McLaughlin Field,
with practice most likely having to start a bit later than 5:30 p.m., and players returning home around 9, DaRosa said.
The Bengals play their games at English High School in Jamaica Plain.
The Brookline Jamaica Plain program also had been struggling with numbers for some of its teams, a problem faced by most teams in the Metropolitan Pop Warner League, including the East Boston Jets.
“I had reached out to him and said ‘Hey, we are
having some issues with numbers. To save the season, we might have to come over and partner up like we did in 2021,’” DaRosa recounted his interaction with the Brookline JP coordinator. “I don’t want these kids not to play.”
Area philanthropist Ernie Boch Jr. made a $15,000 donation in July to help the program. DaRosa said he has used $12,000 to purchase new equipment and cover registration fees as well as insurance.
The Bengals having to relocate caught Boch by surprise.
“That would be good to get some playing time, that would cause a little bit of excitement. But it’s disappointing, we will see what happens,” he told the Herald. “I just can’t believe the kids are not signing up.”
A city spokesperson told the Herald the Parks and Recreation Department has spoken with the Bengals about “potentially moving their practices to another field, particularly since Clifford Park will be
renovated in the future.”
DaRosa admitted he has never really considered moving his program to another park that it could use on its own. The size of Clifford Playground and its accessibility for families with children who participate are big draws despite its proximity to Mass and Cass, he said.
Another sports program, The Base, is also headquartered at Clifford Playground. The urban academy engages with roughly 1,500 youth per year, a majority from nearby neighborhoods.
President and CEO Steph Lewis credited partnering with community organizations to the success the Base has had in children not just playing sports but also being prepared for college and careers after high school.
Even though his program is running strong, the proximity to Mass and Cass has presented some challenges, Lewis told the Herald. There have been multiple times when teams traveling to the park for a game have canceled because they don’t have enough players that day, he said.
“I am not going to question their integrity. That’s not my place or my position to do so, but I do find it a big coincidence,” Lewis said. “But we do our due diligence.”
The city’s Parks and Recreation Department is looking to redesign Clifford Playground. Officials held two meetings earlier this month, with residents pressing for more money to be invested on top of the project’s $7.2 million budget.
The City Council has given very little notice to the public of the ongoing project at the park, and no councilors showed up for a walk-through with residents and department officials.
Construction is slated to commence as early as the middle of next summer, project manager Lauren Bryant said.
“We overwhelmingly heard from the community that they would like to have an in-depth, but expedited community process in order to be able to get the park under construction as quickly as possible,” she said in an email.
DaRosa’s stance on Clifford’s future: “It is not the design of the park that is the issue. The issue is the safety of the park. Parents aren’t worrying about a sprinkler pad. Parents are worried about the needles left inside the play structures.”