Outdoor soccer heats up — indoors

WEST JORDAN — It's a problem that many youth, recreation and even competitive league soccer coaches across the valley find themselves in every year.

Each spring, Ab Rees takes his team out of state to compete in tournaments. And each year, Rees, like many other coaches along the Wasatch Front, finds his team struggling to compete against those from states where snow and winter aren't factors.

In the spring, most Utah teams are just getting outside to start practicing on grass again. Teams from areas such as Arizona and Southern California, however, have already been practicing outdoors for months.

"They're in the middle of an outdoor league for crying out loud. It's just very, very hard to compete," said Rees.

But he hopes that will all change thanks to a unique training facility that has just opened in West Jordan.

Rees, along with two other area coaches, Dennis Burrows and Patrick Rennie, have gotten together to open the United Soccer Center, a soccer-exclusive facility that allows teams to practice outdoor soccer, inside. All three men are coaches for Salt Lake City Sparta in the Women's Premier Soccer League.

Unlike typical indoor soccer facilities along the Wasatch Front that look like a hockey rink with turf, the United Soccer Center offers a unique field designed to simulate grass.

"For years, we've had to resort to basketball gym floors, indoor football fields, little pieces of turf on ice. There hasn't been a soccer-specific training facility in Utah ever, and we need it bad," Rees said. "There's a lot of demand for training space in Salt Lake. Utah teams are at a huge disadvantage when we go up against competitors from warm-weather states. We have 41/2 months of snow restraints where those teams get to train year round."

The new training facility boasts three mini fields on 11,000 square feet of turf that once belonged to a Division I college football team in the East. An accidental fire during a pep rally, however, left a portion of the field scorched before a single game had been played on it, Rees said. Because of that, the entire field had to be replaced.

The United Soccer Center was able to pick up a portion of that field, none of it burned, at a big discount.

"It's the only soccer-training facility in Utah to have that nice thick field turf, like on professional fields. It's a realistic playing surface. It's designed to simulate grass," Rees said. "The turf is new and in great condition."