‘We have no place else to go. And now we have to push back.’

Colton Crayton said over the last couple of years it’s been difficult to play with his father, Brian, a combat medic who retired from the military in 2012 after sustaining an injury while serving in Iraq. “We haven’t really been able to play much … outside of video games,” he said.

Colton’s mother, Jennifer Crayton, who joined her son for a late April video interview, said the injury caused degenerative issues in Brian’s spine. “And doctors haven’t been able to pinpoint it,” she said. “But he can’t feel his legs a lot of the time and he can’t move them properly. He’s in a lot of pain, pins and needles. And he’s not sleeping because of it.”

As a result, Jennifer said Brian can tire easily, and even on those occasions when he does feel physically up to accompanying the family to the park, his participation can be limited by on-site accessibility issues. So, Jennifer said her hopes were raised when Columbus officials announced plans to transform McCoy Park on the Southwest Side into a therapeutic recreation park for people with disabilities, with City Council authorizing about $1.6 million in 2023 and ’24 for a contract to create designs and engage the public on plans for Gender Road and McCoy parks. Work on the latter was anticipated to be completed in early 2027 and would have included adaptive soccer and baseball fields, a splash pad, a playground, and more.

“There had been chatter in 2023, and then in 2024 plans were released, and that’s when they told us they would break ground in 2026. And then nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Jennifer, whose family lives in Hilltop, less than a 10-minute drive from McCoy Park. “And then in April, they were like, ‘Oh, by the way…’”

Jennifer and Colton described themselves as blindsided by the proposed deal surfaced earlier this month and approved in a 5-3 City Council vote on April 20 that will hand over the bulk of McCoy Park for use as a training facility for a new National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) expansion team owned by private investors, including the Haslam Sports Group. The deal includes $50 million in public funds split equally between Columbus and Franklin County, which will be used to build a training facility at McCoy Park and complete the upgrades needed for ScottsMiracle-Gro Field to host a second team. (The city plans to use bonds for its portion of the funding, which will be paid back via an additional 2 percent ticket tax at the stadium.)

“That park means a lot to me, and if City Council does give it to the soccer team, it would be like losing a family member, because … it would be one of the only places where me, my little brother, my dad, and my mom could all play together at one time,” said Colton, 13, who prepared a speech he will read during a “Hands Off Our Park” rally organized jointly by the Columbus Education Association and the Columbus Education Justice Coalition. The rally is set to kick off at McCoy Park beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, May 1. 

As part of the deal approved on April 20, City Council included an amendment that requires operators of the NWSL expansion team to contribute $3 million to fulfill the “initial vision” for McCoy Park, to be built on city-owned property on the Southwest Side of Columbus.

The city has made similar promises in the past, including Mayor Andrew Ginther’s pledge to build a sports park at Historic Crew Stadium. Following years of failed negotiations with the Ohio Expositions Commission, which declined to give up the stadium’s land, the city instead built Kilbourne Run Sports Park near Westerville – a facility that neighboring residents described as “a failure of access” in a just-published Columbus Dispatch report, which cites high rental fees that have made the field inaccessible to low-income and immigrant communities.

Jennifer Crayton, for one, expressed doubt that the city would be able to deliver on the promise of a new park comparable to what the community would have had in a revamped McCoy. “The trust is gone,” she said. “But they’re like, ‘We’ll find a new spot with the same timeline.’ It’s almost May, which means they have to find something in the next few months. And, I’m sorry, but come walk the Franklinton area with me. Walk the Hilltop. Show me where there are 28 acres of available green space. I guarantee every site they will point out is a brown site (formerly industrialized land where redevelopment is complicated by potentially hazardous contaminants), which will take decades to make into green space, and even longer to make into usable park space.”

The Dispatch published a report last year citing CDC research that included the neighborhood around McCoy Park among the census tracts with the lowest life expectancy in the country at just 60 years old – nearly 20 years lower than the national average. One of the dozen policy changes recommended by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio to improve health outcomes for neighborhood residents was to give them “more access to green spaces,” according to the article.

“We are so disadvantaged when it comes to economics and green space and length of living, and this [park] was a chance to us to push back against that,” said Jennifer Crayton, who among other things lamented the loss of a splash pad that could have provided summer relief in a part of the city where community pools are either absent or unaffordable to residents. “And this decision doesn’t just affect me. It affects those families whose kids don’t have an adaptive place to play, it affects those who did play soccer there. … And now we’re at a point of [asking], ‘Where do we go?’ We have no place else to go. And now we have to push back.”

Crayton said she understands the headwinds those opposed to the development plans are faced with in the wake of the City Council vote, and she acknowledged that neighboring residents might not be able to preserve McCoy Park as envisioned even just six weeks ago. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to join others in at least making the effort, describing herself as someone imbued with “a Don Quixote mindset and a Joan of Arc fighting complex.”

“And it’s not that we don’t want a professional women’s soccer team here, because we do. But we think it was rushed, and we think it was done in a community that is consistently underserved, underrepresented, and typically not heard,” said Crayton, who plans to join others at Friday’s rally in collecting signatures for a ballot initiative aimed at saving McCoy Park. “If nothing else, you’re going to hear us. You’re going to hear that we are angry. And we’re going to show up in the votes for mayor, for our District 7 representation, for our District 6 representation. So, if we can’t do something directly about McCoy Park, we’re absolutely going to do something when it comes time to change the powers that be at City Hall.”