‘She Plays Here’ sidelined: How Utah's women's sports facility was benched
By: Kyle Garrison
Despite widespread support and sound reasoning behind development, financing and community impact, the proposal to turn the old Salt Lake Bees stadium into a women’s sports facility was shut down after being one of three winners of the Ballpark NEXT design contest.
The “She Plays Here Movement” was an initiative put together that would implement a sports facility to compensate multiple different women’s sports teams throughout the state, said Erica Bindas, president of the Utah Wild ultimate frisbee team.
“All these different organizations are in kind of different spots, but we have so many of the same pain points, so many of the same struggles and experiences,” Bindas said. “So it was cool to kind of come on board and realize how much alignment there was and then determine that there was a really viable solution for this space that could help solve all those problems.”
The “She Plays Here Movement” was a project that would have allowed multiple professional sports teams in Utah a chance to have their own facilities dedicated to women’s sports, including restaurants, a child care center and the ability to double as a venue for large gatherings. The proposal, submitted to the Salt Lake City design contest for the Ballpark neighborhood, promised “to, among other things, modify the Salt Lake Bees’ current baseball stadium to include a rectangular space that can house football, soccer, rugby, and ultimate frisbee,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
KSL podcast host Amy Donaldson said she worked hard to make the “She Plays Here Movement” a reality in order to help advocate for the growth of women’s sports in Utah. When the city said the proposal was not binding, Donaldson and the rest of the initiators took that as a challenge.
“We get it, but we’re going to make something so financially viable, morally acceptable and community celebrated that you’re not going to be able to resist, and that’s what we did in every measure,” Donaldson said.
Despite over a year of deliberation and sound reasoning behind any restrictions that might come to light during development, the project was shut down due to the fact that the design contest was not legally binding.
Many of the advocates involved were aware of the low chance this specific project would become a reality but continued to push regardless of the odds, the The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
“The She Plays Here proposal winning the city’s design competition provides no guarantees it’ll actually get done because it’s not legally binding,” Alex Vejar wrote in a June 2023 story. “The city has to allow bids on development of the parcel on which the stadium sits through a RFP (request for proposals) process. Those involved with the project worry that it’ll get stuck in government bureaucracy and perhaps never come to fruition.”
The Utah Falconz, a women’s professional football team based in Salt Lake City, has
resorted to practicing in local parks and relies on player fees to supplement their
expenses, said Lacy Mile, a linebacker for the team. Efforts to secure local funding,
she said, continue to fall short.
The compensation the team and players are asking for is far from unrealistic, she added.
“Our league championship is going to be broadcasted on ESPN 2, so we are making strides, but we need the community to support us as well, and at the end of the day all we are asking for is as much as they give to the men’s teams around the state,” Mile said.
According to data from the Utah State Legislature, the Falconz have applied for just $146,700 in funding from the state but are still struggling to receive that base amount. Meanwhile, Ryan Smith, owner of the Utah Hockey Club, was granted $900 million for a new downtown sports complex that would host the Utah Jazz and Utah Hockey Club.
Although the initiators for the movement, Tessa Arneson, Aabir Malik, Matthew LaPlante and Amy Donaldson, were aware of the possibility that the non-binding legality of the Ballpark NEXT design contest could allow for their idea to be vetoed, the reality that a park would be built instead of a women’s sports facility was heartbreaking.
Donaldson and the rest of the movement’s advocates were shocked when the proposal was vetoed.
“We get to hang onto the heritage of the ballpark, we get to do something that’s never been done before and we fold, we go back to the same old crap,” she said. “That’s why I’m still so stunned at the city's decision.”
To the bewilderment of many of the initiators, the city decided that a new park will be put in where the Salt Lake Bees stadium used to reside. City planning commissioner Mike Christensen was quoted in a Salt Lake Tribune article discussing the city's inability to maintain upkeep for their many parks.
“The city is willing to spend millions of dollars on a project, and then, for lack of a better way to describe it, the city just kind of lets everything go to sh--,” Christensen said. “In the meantime, and when people finally get fed up, the city proposes another multimillion-dollar project in order to try to solve the problem, but there’s never any commitment to actually keep things maintained.”
For a team like the Utah Falconz, community support is crucial in encouraging the next generation of girls to pursue athletics, Mile said.
“A lot of the community support we do revolves around Girls on the Run or the Utah Girls Tackle Football League. We want to make sure that those younger girls can do anything they put their mind to,” she added.
Aabir Malik, another advocate for the initiative and real estate developer with the Coleman Group at the time, played a role in considering the factors behind the development process and was able to come up with solutions that allowed for the venue to be used for a multitude of different things.
“This would have been an amazing opportunity to showcase women’s sports teams as a multi-use complex and really have it activated by multiple sports and accessed as a potential concert venue as well,” Malik said.
The Maven District, led by CEO and co-founder Tessa Arneson, is a group of majority female-owned businesses dedicated to creating a block of locally owned businesses in Salt Lake City to promote a more diverse community. Arneson was a major advocate for the “She Plays Here Movement” and talked about her role in trying to make this dream become a reality.
“We wanted to figure out how to make a stadium more than just a stadium. We wanted to figure out how to make it an icon and an anchor for the entire neighborhood,” she said. “That stadium was only open 75 days a year, and we wanted to make it an area where you could use the entire area around the stadium more often than just when the stadium is open so it doesn’t turn into a dead zone.”
Malik and Arneson did not come up with this idea overnight; the logistics of the project were deliberated over, and solutions were found for any problems that may have arisen, they said. Despite not gaining enough traction to become a reality, Malik said more wide-spread support around the project would help gain interest.
“I think that a lot of people don’t think of [The She Plays Here Movement],” he said, “but if it had greater media coverage, awareness would’ve been generated and people would have come out and realized that there was so much in equity when it comes to specifically women’s sports, and the lack of access to facilities would have allowed a louder voice.”
In an ESPN article, it was reported that women’s sports are projected to earn $2.35 billion globally in 2025, a 25% increase from 2024.
The statistics behind growth in women’s sports allude to the fact that investing in these teams now can pay dividends in the future, and the Kansas City Current’s new stadium has proved that. An article from USA Todayillustrates the revenue growth from the project.
“It’s a $20 million annual revenue swing. That effectively doubles what our organization is doing from a top-line basis,” Kansas City co-owner Chris Long said of the new CPKC Stadium, the first purpose-built stadium for a women’s team.
As women’s sports continue to grow, the incentive to invest has only become more prevalent. According to ESPN reporter, Micehlle Steele, within just one year, women’s sports worldwide have grown by over half a billion dollars and are on pace to continue that exponential growth.
“We thought Utah was a good place for [She Plays Here] because we thought Utah was a hotbed for sports right now,” Arneson said, “and we also thought we would be able to sell legislative tours on this idea.”