Build It, They Will Come
Posted by Liz Cutler Gates on August 24, 2009
Saturday’s Wooster, Ohio, Daily Record contains a story about the soccer fields that Randy Moomaw built near his home near Smithville, Ohio. (Randy is the associate pastor of worship at the Grace Brethren Church in Wooster.) To read the complete story, click here.
At right, summer soccer camp volunteer Andrew Simms talks with Smithville’s Joshua Laird about footwork on Aug.12 at Moomaw Farms practice fields. Over 60 Smithie boys participated in the three-day camp.
Build it, and they will come: Moomaw plows up corn to build soccer fields in Smithville
SMITHVILLE — A few years ago, Randy Moomaw’s sons started to show an interest in soccer, so he went out looking for fields in the village where they could practice.
When he couldn’t find any, he made his own.
“Some people plant flowers in their backyards, we decided to plow soccer fields,” Moomaw said.
Randy, a farmer, and his wife, Jackie, plowed an acre of their corn field and used donated pipe from Scot Industries to create the first practice field in his backyard about four years ago.
In the beginning, his sons, Kyle and Tyler, utilized the field with their friends.
“We thought they would play on it for awhile and then they’d get tired of it and we would go back to planting corn,” Moomaw said.
But because of the growing popularity of the sport in Smithville — which could be seen by the beehive of activity on the Moomaws’ soccer field — he decided to take down two more acres, creating a trio of fields for local boys to play on.
Click here to read the rest of the story.
Click here to see a video of Randy’s soccer farm. It was filmed last year by Randy’s dad, Galen, using a video camera mounted on a remote control airplane.
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