Cramming twenty-odd adults into a bathroom isn’t the most effective way to get ready for a soccer match.
Yet at Boxer Stadium in Balboa Park, that’s just how it goes.
“The existing ‘locker rooms’ are really just bathrooms with small benches in them,” said Brendan Browne, San Francisco City Football Club’s members’ board chair. “There are no lockers, and you cannot fit a soccer team and coaching staff in there.”
While “locker” may be painted above the door of the room tucked behind the stadium’s stands, it is far from a locker room. In fact, there are no lockers at all. To Browne’s surprise, however, the stadium does have locker rooms.
The North American Soccer League’s San Francisco Deltas, who were champions in their one and only season, left behind both a short legacy and a storage container locker room in Boxer Stadium’s parking lot.
As part of their contract with the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, the team was granted space in the stadium used as their training ground. That included enough room for shipping containers in the parking lot.
When SFCFC last played in Boxer Stadium in 2024, Browne and SFCFC didn’t know about the parking lot locker room at all.
At the time, it could have solved some of the club’s problems with the historic venue. And at a park that’s been struggling to find suitors in recent years, the makeshift locker room could provide incentive to local teams looking for a new home.
The one-time Deltas shipping container locker room has been repurposed by Rec and Park.
“The space is currently used by Rec and Park staff for internal operations, but it can be made available to long-term tenants who need additional space,” a Rec and Park spokesperson told The Ingleside Light.
An asset like the locker room could be a draw for local clubs like SFCFC. At the team’s current home, Kezar Stadium, they have access to changing rooms. But as they face eviction from Kezar, the club looks to options across the city, including San Francisco State University’s Cox Stadium and University of San Francisco’s Negoesco Stadium as well as Boxer Stadium.
Each venue has drawbacks, but locker rooms at Boxer turn out to be the least of the team’s worries. Browne said that the real reason that SFCFC hasn’t played in the stadium for the last couple of years is due to the field itself.
“Boxer needs substantial work done to the pitch. It's uneven, and there are holes in the grass, so it's a player safety hazard,” Browne said. “Our coaching staff refuses to play there mainly for that reason.”
On one occasion, a referee approached the club just before kickoff, letting them know that the holes on the pitch made it too unsafe to go ahead with the match. To avoid the match being canceled and hundreds of disgruntled fans, Browne got to work.
“I had to grab a shovel, wheelbarrow, some dirt and fill in holes on the pitch an hour before we were set to start our season,” Browne said.
Tyler Hinman, a fellow board member and the club’s scorekeeper, witnessed the pre-match scramble.
“That's not something that we should be having to deal with, with all the other stuff that goes into administering a game day,” Hinman said.
On top of issues with the pitch itself, one of SFCFC’s league requirements is to have a scoreboard. Even though Boxer was built to host San Francisco Soccer Football League matches over 50 years ago, Boxer Stadium has no permanent scoreboard.
Rec and Park claimed that the field has a portable scoreboard for the stadium’s renters to use, which Hinman said he didn’t know.
“If there's a scoreboard at Boxer that's at our disposal, that's news to me,” Hinman said. “We tried a really large monitor of a website or an app that we can keep score on…it's really not a viable solution long term.”
Lights are another issue. Cox Stadium doesn’t have floodlights, causing scheduling issues with the club last season, according to president Aaron Mansfield. The team likes to host night matches, something that isn’t possible without floodlights.
“In my perfect world, we would have a nice relationship with SF State and they work together on getting lights installed and that becomes our future home,” Mansfield said.
Playing at three different venues last season, including one outside of San Francisco altogether in South City, the team still hasn’t found its perfect fit.
“It's a shame that the city has let this historic place deteriorate to its current state, especially given the high demand for soccer pitches in the city,” Browne said.
Despite the problems, Hinman recognizes the history and importance of one of the oldest soccer stadiums in the U.S.
“The bones are there,” Hinman said. “If it got a solid scoreboard, improved locker rooms and more consistent field quality — I mean, that's a lot of undertaking — but if it were up to snuff, we'd love to play there.”
