The 'nomad' Net-Surfers will soon have a place it can call home - but the road there has been a long and winding one.
The southern Indiana all-girl club has been busy developing a 22 acre flat farm site beside Highway 111 for a soccer complex comprising five full-sided and five small-sided fields.
Phase one of the project is seeing the building of a parking area, the excavation of the land, fencing, the development of two fields for full sided play and two for the small game, and a structure for holding board meetings in.
Estimated costs for this phase come in at around $75,000, but Tony Holland of Net-Surfers said the club hopes to cut a lot of it by utilizing volunteers. In fact, Holland - with the assistance of some soccer mad teenagers and parents - spent 10-11 hours a day through the entire summer on their "field of dreams" by building a farm fence around the site. He reckons the hard toil has helped save nearly $50,000.
"We had the fence boards sawn out of the oak and ash trees that I and some dads had cut down off our land," he said. "We left all the shade trees that we could but those trees were in the way of fields and needed to come down. We hired an excavation company to grind up the remaining tree tops and stumps into piles of mulch which we are using to build a walking path around the outside of our park.
They also spread topsoil and began developing four fields that they hope to plant in grass this fall.
"Our goal is to begin league play there either next spring or next fall depending on the fields," said Holland. "We have written several grants and are waiting to hear from them. Financially we have done everything we can possibly do.
"This park is a dream that I want to see and make happen for our girls and community. We are making a difference to the girls that play for Net-Surfers and this park is only a tool that will help us do even more for them."
Starting out with a girls' and a boys' team in 1995, Net-Surfers dropped the boys' outfit a year later but the original female squad stayed together until 2001, winning Hoosier State Games titles five times before heading off to high school.
Director of coaching David Smith said he was spurred to start a new generation of Net-Surfers by his younger daughter, when a new U11 competitive team was formed that same year. Two more teams were added the following year and in 2003 it was accepted into the Indiana Youth Soccer Association as a club.
Net-Surfers will have 100 girls playing soccer this fall, including six teams between U10-U14 who will play in the Kentucky Select Soccer League out of Louisville; the U9 Academy, which plays in the G.I.R.L.S. League out of Bloomington; and the U6-U8 Academy.
Net-Surfers' Tony Holland can be contacted at webmaster@net-surfers.org.
The southern Indiana all-girl club has been busy developing a 22 acre flat farm site beside Highway 111 for a soccer complex comprising five full-sided and five small-sided fields.
Phase one of the project is seeing the building of a parking area, the excavation of the land, fencing, the development of two fields for full sided play and two for the small game, and a structure for holding board meetings in.
Estimated costs for this phase come in at around $75,000, but Tony Holland of Net-Surfers said the club hopes to cut a lot of it by utilizing volunteers. In fact, Holland - with the assistance of some soccer mad teenagers and parents - spent 10-11 hours a day through the entire summer on their "field of dreams" by building a farm fence around the site. He reckons the hard toil has helped save nearly $50,000.
"We had the fence boards sawn out of the oak and ash trees that I and some dads had cut down off our land," he said. "We left all the shade trees that we could but those trees were in the way of fields and needed to come down. We hired an excavation company to grind up the remaining tree tops and stumps into piles of mulch which we are using to build a walking path around the outside of our park.
They also spread topsoil and began developing four fields that they hope to plant in grass this fall.
"Our goal is to begin league play there either next spring or next fall depending on the fields," said Holland. "We have written several grants and are waiting to hear from them. Financially we have done everything we can possibly do.
"This park is a dream that I want to see and make happen for our girls and community. We are making a difference to the girls that play for Net-Surfers and this park is only a tool that will help us do even more for them."
Starting out with a girls' and a boys' team in 1995, Net-Surfers dropped the boys' outfit a year later but the original female squad stayed together until 2001, winning Hoosier State Games titles five times before heading off to high school.
Director of coaching David Smith said he was spurred to start a new generation of Net-Surfers by his younger daughter, when a new U11 competitive team was formed that same year. Two more teams were added the following year and in 2003 it was accepted into the Indiana Youth Soccer Association as a club.
Net-Surfers will have 100 girls playing soccer this fall, including six teams between U10-U14 who will play in the Kentucky Select Soccer League out of Louisville; the U9 Academy, which plays in the G.I.R.L.S. League out of Bloomington; and the U6-U8 Academy.
Net-Surfers' Tony Holland can be contacted at webmaster@net-surfers.org.
