Southport offers 10 sports to play during the spring. Of those teams, seven of them need to use Cardinal stadium to practice and play, and this doesn’t even factor in offseason workouts for football and both boys and girls soccer. With many teams wanting to use the field to get their practices in, scheduling is difficult.

A new field at Mary Bryan Elementary officially opened in fall 2022 has helped solve this problem. Right next to the existing grass soccer field is a new turf field with soccer, boys lacrosse and girls lacrosse lines painted on it. It provides an extra field for any team that needs to practice to be able to do so.

“It really will benefit a lot of the athletes here,” athletic director Brian Murphy said.

The field, known as Holder Soccer Complex, will be the home location for SHS and Perry’s soccer teams. It will also be the new home location for SHS’s girls and boys lacrosse teams, who previously played at Cardinal Stadium.

There has been a plan to put in the field for as long as Murphy has been at Southport. It has been on the planning sheet for the while, but they eventually got the funds to make it a reality, according to Murphy

“The money came from savings on other projects,” Murphy said.

Girls lacrosse head coach Rachel Frantz is excited for her team to play on the new field. She feels that it will add to their game and mindset.

“I think it gives them that confidence of ‘Hey, we’re a real enough team, we’re an important enough team that they have this field here for us,’” Frantz said. “I also think it’s going to be a faster game. The turf is so new that the ball rolls faster and it bounces more. So it’s going to be a lot harder to save ground balls going out of bounds, which will be really fun, but will definitely pick up the pace of our game.”

Athletes who have played on the field since its opening are already enjoying a field of their own. Before, the girls lacrosse team had to share a field with two sports at once, and often took last priority, whereas now, they have a field where their practices and games are one of the main focuses.

“I like how much space we have and how nobody else is using it, except for the other lacrosse team,” junior lacrosse player Hailee Schultz said. ”We shared with track and football. That was actually horrible because we didn’t really know if we were going to practice or not.”