New Policy Seeks to Bar AAU Teams from Town Fields

With a preponderance of teams beckoning to use town fields, including Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) teams with few town residents on their rosters, the Parks & Recreation Commission has set out to establish a new fields usage policy to govern the use of the fields it controls.

At the March 21st meeting at the NB Community Center, board director Pamela Gery opened discussion of the issue, other board members offered eye witness accounts of AAU violations, and board chairman Brian Lynch explained the situation.

He said the new policy will replace an antiquated policy that’s been on the books for 10 years. It will have jurisdiction over play on the town fields the Parks & Rec controls, including North Farms Park, Northford Park, Totoket Valley Park, Memorial Field, Coulter Field, Wall Field and DeLongo Field on Mill Road. The policy won’t pertain to Board of Education fields. The new policy will seek to prohibit non-sanctioned teams from using the fields.

“There’s an overabundance of AAU teams without in-town residents that don’t have the right to use the fields with the limited resources we have to maintain them,” Lynch said. “The groups we have an affiliation with--the town basketball association, the little league association, youth soccer, lacrosse and football--should have access to the fields for their practice time and game days. As far as AAU teams and groups with premier players that want to use those fields without incurring any expense of the maintenance and tearing them up and creating a less desirable place to play for our athletes to play is what we would like to stomp out by developing a new field policy.”

When asked how the new policy would be enforced, Lynch said signs could be placed on the fields. Beyond that, he called for police enforcement in extreme situations.

“If your team is scheduled to have a practice on a field and an AAU team tells you to go fly a kite, you’ll have the resources to pick up a phone and call the Parks and Rec department and we can call the police and have them removed," said Lynch. "You can show the police your permit and if they don’t have a permit it makes the conflict go away.”

Lynch would like to develop a policy in accordance with the Board of Education so all town fields will be run the same way: “I don’t know if they have a policy and we’d love to come up with a mutually agreeable policy so everyone knows how it’s supposed to work.”

Another field issue was addressed at last night’s meeting when Joe Candelora, president of the North Branford Little League, requested the use of Memorial Field on Sunday nights at 7 p.m. for a supplementary game for the 11/12-year-old league. Candelora explained that the players who use the field will be town residents so the commissioners voted unanimously to allow him to use the field.