Facing stadium woes, popular Oakland Roots soccer team heads to Hayward

OAKLAND — The city has become known for its sports franchises’ stadium woes, but Oakland Roots SC found itself in a unique situation — even by those standards — when the team had to scramble to find a new field just days before its season kicked off last weekend.

The Roots, which have garnered a passionate fanbase in Oakland, played their home opener at Cal State East Bay in Hayward after determining their regular home field at Laney College was unusable due to heavy winter rains, which delayed the school’s plans to install a new organic field at its 5,500-seat football stadium.

When the Roots tried to lay their own regulation soccer turf over the field, they found that the rubber-and-cork infill hadn’t yet fully settled, leaving the field uneven and forcing officials to postpone the team’s planned March 25 home opener. There’s currently no timeline for a return.

“This is new territory for everybody,” said John Beam, a longtime coach and athletic director at Laney College. “There was no testing of the old field when we resurfaced it last time. Who would’ve thought that the (new) infill could create a possible difference?”

The eventual Roots home opener Saturday at Cal State East Bay’s stadium was a success, a spokesperson said, with nearly 4,700 fans showing up to support the team.

Still, for a franchise that bills itself as Oakland’s own amid an exodus by the city’s major sports teams, abruptly starting the new season in Hayward was less than ideal.

This is the second time in two years that the Roots started the season at a different field. In 2021, while waiting for new turf to arrive, the team played its first few games at Las Positas in Livermore before returning to Laney College to finish out the season.

Oakland has seen most of its professional sports teams leave town — or threaten to — with the Raiders and Warriors both out the door and the A’s future a mystery.

Looming over this season and next is the Roots’ desired move to a new temporary stadium somewhere other than Laney College, where the team leases the football field for $5,490 per home game but often runs into scheduling conflicts with other athletics programs.

“We need to find it really soon,” team President Lindsay Barenz said last year of the new stadium search. “Our fanbase and community have grown so much that we struggle to fit inside Laney on game day.”

Late last year, the team announced it was eyeing two potential new sites to build a temporary, 10,000-seat stadium to call home for a decade: the massive former naval base at Alameda Point, and a large unused parking lot at the Oakland Coliseum complex.

The move could be a watershed moment for a soccer franchise with ambitions of being a major sports brand in Oakland, one whose popular merchandise incorporates the city’s iconic tree logo. Despite competing a division below Major League Soccer, the team regularly sells out home games.

A companion women’s team, the Oakland Soul, is set to begin its season in May. It’s part of a broad wave of professional soccer in the Bay Area, which this week was awarded a new National Women’s Soccer League franchise that’s likely to join the Earthquakes in San Jose.

But the Roots’ “Oakland first” marketing strategy could be jeopardized if the franchise sets up shop in Alameda. And building at the Coliseum site will require the team to navigate the East Oakland property’s tangled and bureaucratic ownership interests.

Half the site is set to be owned by the A’s, which purchased its share from Alameda County in 2019, and the other half by the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, which earlier this year finalized negotiations with the city to begin developing the property.

“The Roots have expressed intense interest about staying in Oakland,” said Henry Gardner, the executive director of the Oakland-Alameda Joint Powers Authority, which oversees the Coliseum complex, in a recent interview.

For now, the team is focused on where it can play its home games, and wants to return soon to the Laney College football field, a centrally located stadium south of Lake Merritt that fans have come to associate with Roots soccer.

“Laney is a huge piece of the fabric of Oakland,” said Beam, the athletic director. “The Roots are part of that fabric as well, and they really mesh with what we’re doing. We’re all in this together.”

Staff writer Rick Hurd contributed to this report.