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Captain Kangaroo, you might be surprised at how much Berea benefits from the 10,000 or so fans who migrate to the Browns practice field each summer and how much the Akron economy could benefit from that. SwitchIt, I like your creative thinking in trying to find ways to make it work to everyone's benefit. In a previous discussion on this subject I was trying to do the same in this post with links to aerial views of the Browns' current practice complex and the potential area at UA.

Just look what the Browns training camp has done for Berea. We could be "The Next Berea!?"

Last time I knew Rachel Tecca is doing great in Iceland, and Hanna Luburgh has started a blog talking about how each day is going for her in Poland. Just in case anyone wants to stay up to date how her pro career is going, here is her blog: http://hluburgh14.weebly.com/

This is the smartest thing I've seen you post. The exposure Browns camp would bring would greatly outweigh a torn up field. Not only for athletics, but that's tens of thousands of people walking around our campus, seeing it, spending their money.. It would be borderline insane to say no to preserve a field. They'll probably re-sod it anyway and it'll be as good as new.

It's a freaking soccer field, not some piece of sacred ground.

Absolutely! No debate. Keep the football players out of our soccer specific stadium. Besides, you can barely call the Browns a professional team… In 2009, Akron had the #1 ranked soccer team in the nation, and a $61M stadium was built for the #113 ranked football team. The following season, the soccer program brought Akron their first ever national championship in a team sport, and the football team went 1-11 for the first of three straight seasons. I can understand that soccer is not as popular here as football, but the least the University can do is leave the soccer pitch to our soccer team. I think the field will get ruined much worse than you think. There is an enormous difference between soccer players running around the field, and (significantly larger) football players at the line of scrimmage. The groundskeepers do work extremely hard on the field, yet it still has looked pretty torn up by the end of the year the last few seasons. Because of Akron's style of play, games become much more difficult when we visit lower quality fields, and I think it would be crazy to risk the quality of our playing surface when our style is so dependent on it.

I know some folks are just going to pay no attention to this assuming it could never happen. Unfortunately, that is not the case. And, to say that a football team practicing on our pitch would not damage it is crazy. You don't see American Football and Association Football played on the same grass field on any kind of regular basis for a reason. Successful D1 NCAA soccer programs don't even practice on their competition field. Proenza is gone, our AD has made questionable decisions in the past, and our new president is a big football fan. UA has a history of sinking a lot of money into football at the expense of other sports. History could easily repeat itself. UA soccer fans don't ignore this.

The key questions about hosting Browns training camp are whether it makes economic sense for UA and whether it doesn't interfere with Zips programs. If it doesn't pass those two tests, forget it. If it does and if UA meets all of the other conditions aside from grass field space, there are ways to remedy that. One example would be to convert the baseball diamond to 100% grass and move all Zips baseball games to Canal Park. UA needs to get specifics from the Browns on exactly how many square feet of grass fields are required and look at options from there. Looking at an aerial view of the Browns current facility in Berea, it doesn't look to me as if they require all that much in the way of grass fields.