TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) – A nonprofit football league might have to call a new place home next season. The City of Toledo Parks Department has deemed that the field at Westwood Park needs a great deal of work and might be unsafe for players.
Those with the Westwood Rams organization say they’ve raised concerns about the safety of the football field for years. But their concerns fell on deaf ears. Now, the Parks Department is seeing what it can do to help fix the problem.
“It kinda hit me in the feels,” said Rams coach Paul Thompson.
The Westwood Rams may have to find a new home field. The one they currently use at Westwood Park has raised some concerns.
“We have overgrown trees, and if you look at our field, it’s like half tree, half baseball and a little bit of football in between,” said Kalie Salas, president of the Westwood Rams.
Some of the concerns with the field itself include holes in the ground, tree roots and uneven ground.
Coach Paul Thompson said they have taken it upon themselves to keep the field looking nice.
“We constantly clean up graffiti, we take care of the issues around the field, the city doesn’t do it. We clean up the garbage, we take out the garbage, the city doesn’t do it,” said Thompson. “So yeah, I was a little upset when we’ve done everything for the city for their park and they want to take this away from us.”
Joe Fausnaugh, the director of parks and youth services for the city of Toledo, said the site is particularly harder to fix than other parks.
“It’s really tough to go into this site and treat it the way we have several other parks because there, we’ve completely regraded the field, crowned it so it drains properly, reseeded it. In this case, the field doesn’t really fit appropriately in that space because the trees have gotten so big,” said Fausnaugh.
There have been conversations about moving the football field to a different park to allow for safer accommodations.
“Nobody wants to put kids in an unsafe situation,” said Fausnaugh. “They’ve been playing there a long, long time. It’s not this terribly dangerous situation; there just are opportunities to make it better.”
“I mean, this is Westwood Park, we’re the Westwood Rams. It wouldn’t make sense for us to go anywhere else,” said Salas. “We’ve been playing here for this long with the trees and everything.”
And for the kids: Ronan Thompson and Cole Roberts both say they enjoy the sport because it’s fun, and they like tackling, pulling flags and winning games.
Rams cheerleader Holly Williams says, “I would feel sad because this is the Rams’ home and we’ve been playing here for several years and it feels really sad for us to leave this place.”
Fausnaugh says the Rams organization is not responsible for raising money to fix the field. According to an email from the Parks Commissioner, there was a conversation about the Rams organization applying for District Improvement Funds to help with fixes.
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This article was published by WTVG on 2025-10-22 19:45:00
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