Football losing West Seattle field

Huddled under the lights, braving dusk's chill, several hundred neighbors settle onto the wooden bleachers of the Depression-era stadium on the west side of town.

Anticipation builds as the West Seattle High football team exits its cramped locker room beneath the stands and stalks down a hallway leading to the field. The players pound their fists against a wall, sending reverberations up to their fans and across to their opponents, who are assembled in the visitors' locker room on the other side of the wall.

Intimacy and intimidation — two moods of high-school football. In Seattle, however, that atmosphere is fleeting. The city's only old-school, high-school stadium is living on borrowed time.

When Tom Burggraff took over as West Seattle's head football coach in 1992, games generated more ambivalence than ambiance. The team played its home games at oversized Memorial Stadium at the Seattle Center rather than snug West Seattle Stadium, as it had in the olden days.

"A lot of people from the community said when I got here, 'You need to get our games back at West Seattle,' " Burggraff says.

They got their wish in 1995. Attendance, win-loss record and student participation have improved ever since — no small thing for a school that has not won a Metro League title since 1961.

"It really feels like home when we play here," senior captain Ben Satia says. "A lot of battles have been won here; a lot battles have been lost here. We play with our past here. We feel their presence."

As West Seattle learns to once again appreciate its community asset, the city prepares to take it away. The Parks and Recreation Department plans to convert West Seattle Stadium into a facility exclusively for track and field; football will no longer be played there. Depending on when funds are allocated, the conversion will occur between 2003 and 2007.

And West Seattle, along with two Seattle private high schools, will be ejected from home.

The stadium is about a mile from West Seattle High, adjacent to a public golf course. From the bleachers, fans can look out across Elliott Bay toward downtown Seattle. In the past two years, the Seattle School District has built four athletic complexes adjacent to high schools in different quadrants of the city, part of an effort to bring football games and other athletic events closer to the schools hosting them.

When the stadium closes for football, West Seattle High likely will play its home games three miles down the road at the new field across the street from Chief Sealth High, its biggest rival. The thought vexes West Seattle alumni such as Len Vann, a 1946 graduate who played football at the old stadium.

School-district officials point out that the new Southwest Athletic Complex does not belong to Sealth but rather to all schools that want to use it.

"Call it what you want," Vann says. "It's Sealth's stadium. And we're not Sealth."

West Seattle Stadium, built in 1930, also is home to two Catholic high schools, O'Dea and Seattle Prep, which have hosted games there for more than 25 years. Those schools don't have the same community ties to the stadium as West Seattle, but the bond is strong.

"West Seattle Stadium provides that hometown-high-school-football setting," says Monte Kohler, O'Dea's head football coach and athletic director. "It's almost like playing at Ferndale or Tumwater. For that night, you feel like the only school in town."

The city's decision to hand over West Seattle Stadium to track-and-field athletes is based on demand, says Patti Petesch, the parks department's citywide recreation manager. Each of the city's 25 rec centers offers track programs for kids. In addition, there are more than 100 community-based youth track clubs in Western Washington. Many adult track clubs also are active.

"We are trying to meet the needs of the entire sporting public, not just those involved in football," Petesch says. "There isn't a dedicated track-and-field venue in the city."

West Seattle Stadium comes closest, boasting the parks department's only all-weather running track. The stadium, however, does not provide a venue for steeplechase or javelin, or offer the ability to run simultaneous field events.

"West Seattle Stadium is our place, too," says Ken Weinbel, chairman of the Pacific Northwest Masters Association, which governs track clubs for athletes age 30 and over. "If that stadium could provide proper event facilities, we would be able to bring in national championships for track and field."

The school district's four new athletic complexes are inadequate for hosting national meets, and Husky Stadium at the University of Washington is too expensive to rent, Petesch says.

West Seattle Stadium hosts four home football games a year for each of its three schools. The natural-grass field cannot withstand much more wear than that, Petesch says. Its renovation is part of an athletic-facilities improvement program that the Seattle City Council adopted in 1998. About $1.5 million in parks-levy money will help pay for it. Petesch figures about another $1 million will be needed, which the city likely will try to obtain through a grant from USA Track & Field, the sport's national governing body.

Rob Cozens, a 1974 West Seattle High alumnus whose son plays on the current team, says he feels like the city is improving its parks facilities everywhere except at West Seattle Stadium, "where they are taking away and not providing a replacement.

"If the city needs a first-class track-and-field facility, that's fine, but don't take away from others to accomplish that," he says.

Petesch says the school district's four new neighborhood athletic complexes make it easier for the city to close West Seattle Stadium to football.

But none of those four fields have lights, making West Seattle the city's only neighborhood stadium where football can be played in the evenings. That is one of the things that makes the old place a treasure for high-school football, says Frederic Roebke, a West Seattle High volunteer assistant football coach.

"Sometimes the scoreboard doesn't work," he says. "But you stand on that field and watch the sunset reflect off the Seattle skyline. You smell the fresh-cut grass and you say to yourself, 'It's time to play a football game.' "

Stuart Eskenazi can be reached at 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com.