Football Nomads could become wanderers if police station rises on stadium site

The North Winnipeg Nomads may be forced to live up to their wandering namesake if the City of Winnipeg follows through on a proposal to build a new police station on the site of football club's stadium.

The City of Winnipeg is eyeing up Charlie Krupp Stadium on the Old Exhibition Grounds along McPhillips Street as the preferred place to build a new North District police station that would replace the dilapidated and cramped District 3 station on Hartford Avenue in West Kildonan.

The city has set aside $23.1 million to build the new station, which would be the fourth and final new police station in a construction program that started in 2007 with the construction of a new East District station on Dugald Road in the St. Boniface Industrial Park.

The city also built a new West District station on Grant Avenue in Tuxedo and converted the former Canada Post warehouse-and-office-tower complex into a new police headquarters. ​

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Mynarski Coun. Ross Eadie said the city has determined the Old Exhibition Grounds would best suit the needs of the Winnipeg Police Service, given the easy access to a major thoroughfare on McPhillips Street.

But if the city follows through on this decision, it would displace the North Winnipeg Nomads, a football program that serves about 300 amateur athletes — boys, girls and young adults, aged seven to 22 — and has played out of Charlie Krupp Stadium since 1997.

This may also require the city to build a replacement stadium, said Eadie, who does not like the idea of displacing the football club.

Eadie, the lone member of city council who serves on the Winnipeg Police Board, said the city looked at other locations including another site on the Old Exhibition Grounds, the former brewery land on Redwood Avenue and the vacant former Safeway on Main Street.

According to city budget documents, the budget for land acquisition is $3.1 million, while construction would cost $20 million, assuming the project is able to reuse the design that served as the basis for the Grant Avenue and Dugald Road District Stations.

While no decision has been made, Nomads president Jeff Pirrie said it would be a "bad idea" to displace his club.

"I was surprised, shocked and a little bit disappointed they would even think about picking this site," he said Thursday evening, after the Nomads senior girls squad shut out the St. James Rods.

"We put 300 kids from the North End and area on this field every year [and] sometimes more. It's a little bit disappointing."

It would be counterproductive to harm amateur sport for the sake of serving the police, Eadie said.

"Nomads football is not just teaching kids about football, it's about team spirit, it's about community," he said. "This is what they're instilling on youth and it keeps them out of trouble, right? It's a prevention thing."