![]() ![]() “After six months, it proved to do exactly what we hoped it would. “This was so different to anything we had done before,” says Rhein. There was a lot of banging heads against walls, there were a lot of naysayers.”Īmanda Rhein, Marta’s senior director of transit oriented development, said initial skepticism from within the organization was overcome after it saw how reinvented public space could work. “Atlanta United was not around yet and someone asked, do people even play soccer in this city? But that motivated me. “My first meeting with Marta, I think they thought I was crazy,” recalls Patel. The end goal is for teams playing at station pitches to form a league where players use the train system to travel around the city for games – opening up low-cost organized soccer to previously ignored communities. The facilities are free for kids to use while fees for adult pick-up games and other events flow into Soccer in the Streets community programs. The Five Points field, opened in 2016, has proven such a success with communities from across the city that Marta says it is set to green-light up to 10 more locations in the next few years – beginning with two pitches to be opened at the West End station by the end of 2018. Five Points is Atlanta’s busiest public transport hub and originally designed as a grand multi-purpose civic space that never met its full potential. Patel’s now not-so-crazy idea saw the world’s first-ever soccer pitch built within downtown’s Five Points station. ![]() Years later the result is Station Soccer, a collaboration driven by Patel between Soccer in the Streets, MLS club Atlanta United, and Marta, Atlanta’s public transportation agency. “I started thinking,” says Patel, “What if we convert some pieces of this land to soccer fields and use the train system as a network for people to get to games?” The parking lots were barely used for what they were intended. Atlanta’s train stations were nearly always adjacent to a giant parking lot – part of a 1970s park-and-ride policy that never really took off. Patel volunteered with Soccer in the Streets and, in his travels across the city, made an intriguing discovery.
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