Tag: Lambeth Field

Categories
News

In brief: Richmond watch, a local avenger, new rules and more

AR-15-style assault rifle outfitted with a bump stock

As the General Assembly finished its fourth week in this year’s session, most of the 3,000 or so bills legislators filed will die in subcommittee, but some are inching toward the governor’s desk for signature into law.

Killed bills:

Danger zone

After a bill to ban the devices used in the Las Vegas concert slaughter passed a Senate Courts of Justice Committee, a Senate Finance subcommittee killed the measure. Other gun safety bills have met a similar fate.

Tebow down for the count

The 13th time was not the charm for Delegate Rob Bell’s bill to allow homeschooled kids to play in public school sports. The past few years it’s made it to the governor’s desk, where it was vetoed, but this year, it died in committee.

Local statue option

A House of Delegates subcommittee smothered several bills January 31 that would have allowed cities like Charlottesville to decide what to do with their Confederate monuments, including one carried by House Minority Leader David Toscano. The Senate had already nixed letting localities determine the fate of their monuments.

Staying alive:

Child porn hearings closed

Toscano’s bill to close child pornography preliminary hearings to protect victims passed the House of Delegates 98-0, but raises freedom of the press issues. A Fluvanna deputy suggested the measure when he realized those sitting in the balcony of a courthouse could have seen images of victims, a scenario not likely in balcony-less Charlottesville and Albemarle courts, where the public was eager to learn details in cases such as that of former CHS teacher Richard Wellbeloved-Stone.

Let doctors decide pot prescriptions

The Senate unanimously passed a bill February 5 that allows physicians to prescribe  cannabidiol oil or THC-A oil for any condition, not just intractable epilepsy, which is already on the books. The House passed its own version of the bill February 2. TBD: where patients with prescriptions actually buy the approved marijuana products.

Kings Dominion overthrow

Two bills that would allow localities to determine if schools open before Labor Day and that rescind the Kings Dominion law passed the House.

 

Quote of the Week: It’s a movement where 30 people with cheap tiki torches can seem like an army in the echo chamber of social media, where white men claim to be the real victims and where a weekend warrior can pass himself off as a disillusioned veteran of war.—How an Alt-right Leader Lied to Climb the Ranks, a New York Times documentary on Eli Mosley

West2nd

SUP with West2nd

City Council denied a special use permit at its February 5 meeting for developer Keith Woodard to add a 10th floor to his multimillion-dollar mixed-use project called West2nd.

Council changes

Meetings will now begin half an hour earlier at 6:30pm, and community members will be permitted to speak more than once at each session. Speakers will not be able to give their allotted time to another person, but they may now share it. As for the kill switch? Council is now required to livestream on public access TV through any disruption.

Oath of office

Katrina Callsen. Contributed photo

Katrina Callsen, the Albemarle County School Board member whose campaign drew controversy last year because of her association with Teach for America and massive donations from its affiliates, was one of several women featured on the cover of a January issue of Time magazine. The article, called “The Avengers,” highlighted the trend of women running for office since Donald Trump’s election.

Lambeth lives

After mass opposition, UVA’s Board of Visitors will no longer consider historic Lambeth Field as a location for its proposed softball stadium, university officials announced at the January 29 BOV meeting. Three alternate locations include the Park, which is located on North Grounds, a soccer practice field near Klockner Stadium and a parking lot at University Hall.

Friends of Harvey

A new women’s group goes after UVA alum/mega-donor/billionaire Paul Tudor Jones for supporting Harvey Weinstein and for saying childbearing is a focus “killer” for women traders and investors. Women United collected signatures to remove his name from UVA buildings at the January 31 men’s basketball game at John Paul Jones Arena, named for Jones’ father.

Categories
News

Game changer: Dr. William Lambeth taught us to play by the rules

Virginia Military Institute bested UVA 19-0 in an October 1912 game at Lambeth Field during the second season after the NCAA adopted modern football rules.  PHOTO: Rufus Holsinger/Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

Ahead of Super Bowl LII, we’re looking back at Charlottesville’s connection to modern football. And in case you haven’t heard—it’s pretty monumental.

Named after Dr. William Lambeth, who’s known widely as the University of Virginia’s “father of athletics,” Lambeth Field was constructed at the college in 1901 as a place to play football, baseball and track.

In 2013, on the 100-year anniversary of the completion of the stadium, UVA alumni Kevin Edds funded a plaque at the historic site to memorialize the man and his contribution to one of the nation’s favorite sports.

“Dr. Lambeth is one of the most unheralded leaders of early American football,” says Edds, who graduated from the university in 1995, and is the producer of Wahoowa: The History of UVa Football and Hoos Coming to Dinner.

In his research, Edds says he learned that Lambeth, a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association football rules committee who started attending NCAA meetings in their second year of existence, teamed up there with Walter Camp, the father of American football.

“Football was a violent game where you could pull and punch the opposition,” says Edds. “Lambeth and Camp sought to change the rules to make the game safer.”

When the game was first played, forward passes were prohibited and only the player snapping the ball was required on the line of scrimmage, “meaning the others could run forward in mass collisions,” says Edds.

But the two football legacies proposed to allow the forward pass, require seven players on the line of scrimmage, outlaw pulling and punching and breaking the game into four quarters with a halftime break in the middle. Previously, Edds says games were played with two long halves and little time for rest, leading to nasty injuries and deaths, including 26 football-related fatalities in 1909.

“So Lambeth had the UVA football team play a spring game in 1910 with these new proposed rules and reported the results to Camp,” Edds adds. “And the first time the game of football was played this way, in a game with four quarters and a halftime, was at Lambeth Field during this exhibition.”

The university’s football team played its games there until Scott Stadium was built in 1931. And in late 2017, the university announced plans to build a softball stadium at Lambeth Field. The Board of Visitors deferred a decision on the project on December 7, to give themselves more time to consider the community’s unfavorable response.

Longtime Charlottesville resident John Bittner says he questions whether Lambeth Field’s historical significance is getting the weight it deserves.

“Lambeth Field has an important place in the history of college sports, and UVA has a wonderful tradition of preserving historically important architectures, which perhaps, I’d say, probably should be extended to Lambeth Field, as well,” he says.

Categories
News

Lamenting Lambeth: UVA proposes sports complex in its place

Karen Dougald, president of the University Circle Neighborhood Association, says residents were surprised to learn about UVA’s plans to build a softball stadium at Lambeth Field, though the Board of Visitors was scheduled to vote on it at an upcoming meeting. The board deferred its decision to gather more input from the community. Photo by Eze Amos

On December 7, the UVA Board of Visitors deferred a decision on the construction of a softball stadium at the university’s Lambeth Field—and those living nearby are thanking their lucky stars.

Lambeth Field, also known as the Colonnades, opened in the early 1900s as a stadium for varsity football, baseball and track. Now, it’s used by students and the public alike for UVA-affiliated club sports practices and tournaments, pick-up soccer and lacrosse games, festivals, barbecues, people-watching, sun-soaking and more.

When asked about a potential new stadium, second-year Nate Hellmuth, president of the Lambeth Field Apartments Association Council, says “Many are concerned about the lights and sounds from a sports facility just feet away. …If the university decides to build a softball facility in its current proposed location, the university will have effectively destroyed the quiet community that so many love.”

Hellmuth describes Lambeth Field Apartments, which abut the location of the proposed sports complex, as a “desirable upper-class housing area,” and he says residents are concerned about the loss of parking if the stadium is built. Hellmuth says he’s been told by the university that it’ll knock out their entire parking lot.

“This, to many, is more important than the loss of Lambeth Field,” he says. In comments on an online petition he’s circulating, which currently has 496 student signatures, several people said they never would have chosen to live in that apartment complex if it didn’t have a parking lot.

Students and community members say UVA did not include them in its plans to build the stadium until a month before the Board of Visitors was scheduled to vote on it.

“What a surprise to see what was planned,” says Karen Dougald, president of the Lambeth Field-adjacent University Circle Neighborhood Association, who was invited to a November 1 meeting at UVA by the school’s community relations department.

“The more questions we asked, the more concerned we became,” she adds. Dougald held a neighborhood meeting December 3, just four days before the Board of Visitors was scheduled to vote on the complex. “It was unbelievable that no one with whom we spoke knew anything about this.”

The community shares several of the same concerns as students, including losing access to Lambeth, noise from the proposed facility’s PA system and stadium lighting—but they also worry about the potential for plummeting home values.

“We know real estate values will tumble because you find very few people who want to have a stadium next door to them,” she says, and suggests that North Grounds should be studied as a possible location because it would better follow the university’s master plan and have a lesser impact on neighborhoods.

“We do not want to take away a lovely stadium for these girls,” Dougald says. “We want them to have this, but to put it where they’re proposing, in our opinion, is absolutely the worst scenario.”

UVA architects Alice Raucher and Michael Joy attended the University Circle neighborhood meeting, as did softball coach Joanna Hardin, former athletics director Craig Littlepage and spokesperson Matt Charles.

Spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn says the university will soon begin a feasibility study and will consider alternative locations for the softball stadium, but a presentation shown to the board at the December 7 meeting says the proposed location would take advantage of existing parking and bring varsity sports back to Lambeth Field.

The current softball field is at The Park in North Grounds, which is a remote location with limited room for expansion, according to the presentation.

“The university remains at the beginning stages of this project and we continue to engage in active dialogue with student residents and our neighbors,” he says. UVA does not need city or community approval to build on its own property.

University Circle resident Martin Kilian says he believes UVA will take the community’s opinion into consideration. The board’s recent decision “gave everybody a little time to collect their breath,” he adds.

This is not the first university project that has drawn neighborhood ire. The Emmet/Ivy parking garage, which was dubbed the “1,200-car monster” by the Lewis Mountain neighborhood, faced fierce opposition—to no avail. The garage opened in 2003.