Students Get a Kick Out of Linking Soccer With Transit

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A group of Cornell University urban planning students came to Cleveland this week with a scholarly objective — learn about potential soccer facilities and suggest how they can link with their surroundings, including public transit. They left with ideas for and discoveries about Cleveland that could result in more than an academic exercise.

Much of the focus of their visit from Cornell, located in Ithaca, NY, was on the Cleveland Soccer Group’s (CSG) plans for a 10,000-seat Gateway South soccer stadium on East 9th Street Extension, south of Interstate 90. But it wasn’t the group’s entire focus.

Leading the students was Cornell professor Mitch Glass, a lecturer in city-regional planning and landscape architecture. Local guides were CSG CEO Michael Murphy and CSG Chief Marketing Officer Gina Prodan Kelly, plus retired Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp. Executive Director Tom Yablonsky.

The group is comprised of a mix of nearly two dozen graduate and undergraduate students. Their workshop, which runs the length of the fall semester starting one month ago, will process collected data, mixing in some brainstorming, and conclude in December with deliverables — site plans, graphics and narratives about their vision for the site.

“We got connected to Michael and Gina and these folks and heard about their stadium project and I noticed that it was in a really important area right here at the South Gateway,” Glass said. “I thought, maybe that’s a project we would get involved with in terms of helping them vision out their objectives.”

He said the intersection of multiple modes of transportation — roads, rails and trails — at the Gateway South site was very exciting for the students as they envision a mix of uses for a new district. The uses could include not just the stadium but a Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA) rail station, housing, commercial and recreation.

“I think they (the students) are really interested in the transportation aspect,” Glass noted. “Planning students today are very focused on mobility so they’re very interested in the Red Line connection — a new station that would serve places to live and serve the stadium, the park system, the Slavic Village-Downtown connector.”

“This intersection of mobility and a series of new uses is very exciting for them and I don’t think they realized that by just looking at maps in Ithaca,” he added. “You have to come here to understand what the heck is going on.”

Averhy Sanborn, a first-year masters student, expected Midwestern Cleveland to be as flat as her hometown of Champaign-Urbana, IL. She said she wasn’t expecting Cleveland’s hills along the Cuyahoga River valley and steep slopes below the South Gateway site.

“I’ve never been to Cleveland before so I learned a lot of things all at once,” she said. “About this site, the topography was the most surprising thing. And I’m really interested in transportation so the connection with the GCRTA and a new Red Line stop seems an imperative for this site.”

The students met with staff from a number of different local entities — CSG, the City of Cleveland, GCRTA, Cleveland Metroparks. They learned from these entities about their plans, projects and constraints, and how the soccer stadium plans can interact with them.

“We see South Gateway as an additive measure in the broader Gateway solution and a great bookend to the city’s Shore-to-Core-to-Shore vision,” CSG’s Murphy said. “It brings net-new visitors, transit riders and tax revenue downtown, including on days when nothing else is happening there. Whatever strategy the city and county land on for Gateway, we want to help make it work.”

The $80 million soccer stadium has a pending application for $19.9 million from the Ohio Sports and Cultural Facilities Fund. The fund was created by Ohio’s General Assembly last year with a fiscal year 2026 budget of $1 billion supported by $4.8 billion in unclaimed funds held by the state. But its reliance on unclaimed funds prompted legal challenges that are still pending.

“We’re not building our plan around when or how that gets resolved,” Murphy said. “We’re focused on what we can control. We recently applied for brownfield funding to support site work at South Gateway, and we continue to evaluate other public and private sources.”

And this week’s site visit by the Cornell students wasn’t focused entirely on the South Gateway soccer stadium. But it was focused on soccer, including looking at potential sites in Greater Cleveland for a concept called Pitch Line — mini soccer field activations of underutilized spaces along transit lines.

The students launched their tour Monday morning at the Matriarchy Office Community & Event Space in The Vitrolite building in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. They then toured mini-pitches at the North Coast Yard on downtown’s lakefront and at the Urban Community School on the west end of Ohio City.

They also checked out potential sites for mini-pitches at Benedictine HIgh School near the Buckeye-Woodhill Blue/Green Line station, and unused portions of park-n-ride lots at the Triskett Red Line station and Green Road Green Line station.

The students took their cue from Atlanta, a city that repurposed several of its rail station park-n-ride lots by laying turf pitches, fencing, bleachers and landscaping on top of them. The Station Soccer concept in Atlanta was boosted this past summer when the city hosted multiple World Cup games.

With downtown office commuting down nationwide since the pandemic, transit agencies cities like Atlanta and Cleveland have been looking at ways of reusing portions of their large station parking lots without permanently losing them to new development. GCRTA officials said they expect downtown commuting to rebound someday.

“We’re working with the GCRTA and the Trust For Public Land to identify not only plots of land along public transit that are well-positioned to be activated play spaces but also neighborhoods that have the density and the volume of people, kids or adults, who will use the spaces,” Prodan Kelly said.

This isn’t the first time Cornell has done an urban planning workshop involving Cleveland. Far from it. Glass said its involvement here goes back to working with former Cleveland Planning Director and Cleveland State University urban affairs scholar Norm Krumholz, who passed away in 2019.

While Glass’ work here is encouraged by his wife, a Cleveland native, the workshops are financially supported by Cornell alumnus Joseph Keithley, former CEO of Keithley Instruments, headquartered in suburban Solon.

And their planning workshops have lasting impacts. Students experience real-world career situations and, ultimately, deliverables like those that public-sector planners and private-sector consultants produce for constituents and clients.

Sometimes they’re more than academic. In 2020, Cornell’s workshop partnered with MidTown Cleveland Inc. community development corporation on a concept for aggregating properties for industrial development. That work became the Midline Priority Investment Area launched in May.

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