AURORA — The Aurora Sports Park will soon be able to handle a larger volume of games and tournaments for longer seasons with four new, multi-purpose fields made with synthetic grass.
This will be the first expansion and upgrading that the 250-acre site at 19300 E. Colfax Ave. has undergone since it opened in 2000. The four new fields will take up 17 acres of 34 acres of land that the city purchased earlier this year.
The park already has 12 baseball and softball fields and 23 multi-use fields for everything from soccer to rugby, but all of those fields were made with natural grass.
“The primary objective with this expansion is to get as much play as long into the season as we possibly can,” said Tom Barrett, director of Parks, Recreation and Open Space. “With real turf, there are limitations — it goes dormant, there’s frost and wear. With synthetic, you’ve got the ability to play for 10 to 12 months out of the year.”
The synthetic grass will also make the opening of the new fields a much faster process. The city expects to unveil them in October 2015.
“That’s the other benefit of going with synthetic turf: You just unroll it and poof; you’re ready to play on it,” Barrett said. “Previously, we spent basically a year growing grass that was durable enough for people to play on.”
John Sawatzke, principle landscape architect at the parks department, said that the Sport Park is at capacity now in terms of how many events and people can be serviced.
The park serves more than 410,000 people annually.
To address overcrowding, Sawatzke said the expansion design includes hundreds of additional parking spaces, another concession stand (there are five stands now), a bathroom facility and spectator seating that’s carved right into the land.
“There’s these topographic steps cut all the way around the fields,” Barrett said. “On the far (east) end, there’s going to be a terraced kind of amphitheater design for people to sit and watch the games.
The expansion will cost $11 million, to be paid for through Certificates of Participation over 10 years. The city used $4 million to purchase the land, and the other $7 million will be used to construct the side-by-side fields and install the synthetic grass.
The additional 17 acres of land that the city bought will be vacant until funding is available to potentially build an indoor field house for year-round play as well as a full championship stadium.
There are preliminary discussions about adding lighting to the new fields. Right now, only the baseball and softball fields are lit.
“It’s hard for the teams to get out on the fields and practice because it gets dark so early during this late season,” said Mike Huber, a commissioner with the Aurora Youth League which serves about 1,000 kids. “That would really help us a lot, and it might be neat for some of the kids to get a chance to play their games under the lights.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or
Open house
What: Plans for Aurora Sports Park
When: 6 p.m. Oct. 15
Where: Aurora Room at Aurora Municipal Center, 15151 E. Alameda Parkway
