Basketball city! Staff will stop taking down rims nightly at some parks and the TDSB will keep its nets up

Thestar.com
June 28, 2019
Jennifer Pagliaro

Shannon Kampf and Joey Case hear the changing of the seasons whenever they open their front door near Toronto’s Greenwood Park. The crack of the bat on ball. The boom of an errant puck on the boards. The splash from a cannonball dive. The dribbling of a basketball and whoops after a three-pointer gets all net.

They love the noise. And like many in a Raptors-crazed city -- and nation -- Kampf and Case say they especially want to hear more sounds of basketball.

“My son’s playing ball outside instead of watching TV. And I think there should be more of that,” said Kampf, a lawyer and mother of two who is pushing for more access to courts in her Leslieville neighbourhood.

On Thursday, their cause won two major victories.

In the morning, in response to mockery over a viral video from the night before that showed kids in full daylight making shots on a hoopless backboard, city spokesperson Brad Ross said parks staff will stop taking down basketball rims nightly at some city parks due to noise complaints.

Later that afternoon, the Toronto District School Board announced it, too, will keep its nets up, saying it will leave the rims in place outside school hours as part of a six-month pilot project.

For at least 10 years, city staff had been responding to neighbourhood noise complaints at courts that are in “close proximity to homes,” Ross said.

In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday, the city acknowledged what was seen in the video viewed more than one million times -- in it, a worker takes down a park rim while youth are using the court in Phin Park near Danforth and Jones Aves. -- was “not reasonable.”

City staff couldn’t immediately say how many courts were targeted for regular rim removal, but Ross said crews “would make their way to various parkettes, and remove the nets and replace them the next day to mitigate noise complaints.”

Ross said the issue will not go to council for consideration and that it’s still within staff’s purview. He said staff consulted with the mayor’s office Wednesday night about the decision to suspend the rim removal.

Going forward, he said staff “will monitor noise complaints on a case-by-case basis.”

“Having a big city is a balancing act all the time,” Mayor John Tory told reporters Thursday morning. “I think that what happened, as often happens in cases like this, is that balance was lost, in that I can understand 10 o’clock at night people maybe -- or 11 o’clock at night -- saying that they’re concerned about noise. But at 6 o’clock in the evening or even 9 o’clock in the evening at this time of year, we should be doing everything we can to get as many kids as possible to be playing basketball in our public parks.”

Tory said residents can’t assume they will live free of noise in a city such as Toronto and said there is a need to have “healthy, positive” activities for youth.

The TDSB, in a statement, said staff will present a report to the board with recommendations on next steps after the six-month pilot is over.

“Young people deserve places to play and if the TDSB can help them by ensuring our basketball nets are up after hours, this is important for us to do,” TDSB director John Malloy was quoted in the statement as saying on Thursday. “Basketball is only getting more popular in Toronto and we want to provide every opportunity for our communities to join in on the fun.”

Ross told the Star the rims were only removed due to noise complaints, but that hasn’t always been the case.

In 2008, former councillor Giorgio Mammoliti pushed to have rims removed at Strathburn Park in his ward in the northwest part of the city to, the Etobicoke Guardian reported then, discourage “drug dealers.”

A public meeting then at St. Basil-the-Great College School after the rims were removed saw a majority of a small group of 50 residents backing Mammoliti’s and the city’s actions.

Mammoliti, the Guardian reported, said then his office received “hundreds” of calls about problems in the park.

Kampf and Case’s Greenwood park boasts a covered recreation venue with retractable backboards and rims. In winter, it is a rink with artificial ice. In summer, it doubles as a basketball court and ball hockey arena.

Yet, even as the Toronto Raptors went on their NBA championship run, becoming the first team outside the United States to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy, Leslieville residents noticed ball hockey was getting more court time than the b-ball, and the backboards were seldom in place.

Rumours swirled in an online neighbourhood forum.

Was there an anti-basketball bias?

The question sparked a bit of an unofficial audit by Case to see what kinds of basketball venues were available in the neighbourhood, and answered the question about the hoops in Greenwood.

Word was, they were broken, said Case.

In response, Case is pushing for more neighbourhood hoops and is thinking of crowdfunding for a court or half-court on a patch of “wrecked grass” in the park, an initiative he says is still in the early stages.

The decisions made Thursday pleased both Case and Kampf.

Basketball, said Kampf, is a low maintenance sport, compared to a sport such as hockey, and is “a more accessible sport, and anyone can do it, really.”

As of this month, there are 137 outdoor basketball courts operated by the city of Toronto, the city says, up from 107 in 2013. Back then, basketball courts were outnumbered by bocce courts. That is no longer the case.

There were recent protests to have rims on school board property maintained as well, which the city has no jurisdiction over.

Cindy Wagman, the Riverside resident who led a successful protest against a proposal to relocate basketball nets shared by Dundas Public School and Queen Alexandra Middle School, welcomed the city pause on rim removals.

“It’s a wonderful acknowledgment of how important sports and outdoor play is for our communities,” said Wagman, who held a “basketball-in” on the courts Tuesday evening. School board officials scrapped the relocation plan triggered by neighbour noise complaints. They also agreed to leave the nets up past 6 p.m.

She also praised the TDSB and those who advocated for keeping basketball courts open after the news they would leave the rims up across all properties over the summer.

“We’re delighted,” Wagman said. “They read the room and realized the Raptors have really captured the hearts and minds of the city. And there was enough energy and enthusiasm to makes this happen and they acted quickly and I think that’s fantastic. This is what we set out to do from the beginning.”