Westshore Warriors displaced by irate neighbour

The Westshore Warriors football team has been booted from using Belmont Secondary School’s field after a verbal altercation made school district staff feel uncomfortable having the team come back.

For years the youth team had practiced, twice a week from 6 to 8pm, on an old grass field but the team got an upgrade when the city of Langford installed a turf field at the new Belmont Secondary School.

The only drawback is that the new field has no lights, so the club invested in portable floodlights and a generator.

But according to neighbours, the lights were too bright and the generator was too loud.

Complaints started coming in to the school, the football club, and eventually to the Sooke School District. Facilities staff were trying to work with neighbours and the Warriors to sort out a solution.

But one neighbour couldn’t wait for a resolution.

He came to a practice in person and yelled profanities at coaching volunteers, verbally berating them, according to what staff told Board chairperson Ravi Parmar. Facilities staff, fearful of future altercations, told the Warriors they had to stop using the floodlights until a permanent solution was found. The team was forced to find another field.

The Warriors found a temporary practice field at Spectrum Community School in Saanich, but a lot of players complained that the field was too far away. As of tonight, the Warriors will be back in Langford at the newly refinished grass field at Spencer Middle School, and even that is temporary.

Parmar hopes to transfer the team to Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School’s new turf field once it opens to the community.

In the meantime, the neighbours who complained respectfully, and the one who chose a more aggressive approach, got what they wanted.

“What that one neighbour in particular did was completely inappropriate, but there was another group of neighbours who came calmly to the school district to ask for support, so I want to give those neighbours the benefit of the doubt. The school district has a role to ensure that we're good neighbours, too,” Parmar said.

While he knows it looks like they let a neighbour bully the team out of their practice space, Parmar said the district had to consider its liability. If they took no action and there was another altercation, they could be “in a very difficult position from a liability perspective,” he said. “I know a lot of people were very upset by that, but I think we found a solution.”

In a city often touted by the current council as a sports destination, it appears some locals don’t agree.