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Last year, the United Soccer League began looking at Pensacola to set up a new team for its USL League One, but one of the biggest questions beyond who would invest in a team is where a team would play. Blue Wahoos Stadium may be the only viable answer.
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves told the News Journal that the city will conduct a feasibility study into converting Blue Wahoos Stadium to host a soccer team along with the Minor League Baseball team.
“This is a feasibility study in every form of the word,” Reeves said. “Is this idea even possible? And if it turns out it is, then we can take another step.”
Several USL soccer teams share their stadiums with baseball teams, including Blue Wahoos' rival, the Knoxville Smokies, which shares the new Covenant Health Park with One Knoxville SC, a USL League One team.
USL, which has multiple levels, has been expanding in recent years as part of a plan to create a Division I league in 2028 that would compete for the same level of players as Major League Soccer. As part of that, it has been looking to start more teams at the Division III level, which is USL League One.
USL's strategy is locating teams in mixed-use entertainment districts with apartments, hotels, retail shops and restaurants, much like has been proposed for the future of the Community Maritime Park.
USL signed a one-year exclusivity agreement with Pensacola in March 2025 to search for a stadium site and entertainment district site, and while that agreement has expired, Reeves said USL is still interested in Pensacola.
Blue Wahoos Stadium regularly hosted football games when it was the home of the University of West Florida football team and regularly hosts the annual youth football games known as the Soul Bowl. Previous setups for football had the field running east-west, but professional soccer generally requires a north-south orientation to avoid goalies having to defend while looking directly into the sun.
Initially, Wahoos Stadium wasn’t in contention as a location, as conversations were about finding a new location for a stadium, but no locations have materialized. Also, as renovation plans for the Pensacola Bay Center move forward, any idea of using bed tax funds appears off the table.
Reeves had publicly ruled out Wahoos Stadium, but seeing other USL teams play in Minor League ballparks shifted his view, particularly since the city has started to have internal conversations about needed updates to Wahoos Stadium by the time the next lease renewal comes up in six years.
“There was kind of just a light bulb moment of saying, well, we're looking for a downtown location that's got developable property nearby to fit this USL model; we already have a stadium now,” Reeves said. “In a perfect world, if this could work, you'd have one stadium to maintain instead of two. It would be significantly less expensive to the taxpayer to renovate an existing stadium and turn it multi-use than you would to build a completely new separate facility that would now have to be maintained.”
When the baseball team’s lease comes up for renewal for Blue Wahoos Stadium in 2032, the stadium will be 20 years old, and Reeves said any stadium at 20 years is going to require “substantive maintenance," such as replacing all of the stadium seats.
Blue Wahoos Stadium's location and orientation on the manmade peninsula that is Maritime Park is directly exposed to the saltwater breeze coming off Pensacola Bay, which adds additional abuse to the stadium's infrastructure.
Covenant Health Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, was built as a multipurpose field for both baseball and soccer and features a retractable baseball mound. That stadium crew of 10 people takes as long as 12 hours to convert from baseball to soccer and spends at least $7,000 each time, but that stadium uses real grass, and sod has to be laid down for each conversion.
Blue Wahoos Stadium went to artificial turf in 2022, and USL allows games to be played on artificial turf.
USL requires a minimum field size of 110 yards by 70 yards, which will fit the field on a north-south orientation. The layout would give the seats along the first-base line the best views of the game.
Reeves said the feasibility study would look at those issues, how it would work and what it would cost, along with the costs of other improvements that will be needed at Wahoos Stadium, whether or not it gets converted to a multipurpose field.
The cost of the study will be between $35,000 and $45,000, and Reeves is searching for a consulting firm to conduct it.
How updates to Blue Wahoos Stadium and the conversion project would be paid for remains an open question. The most obvious source of funds would be the Community Redevelopment Agency, which took over management of the Maritime Park development in 2017.
Reeves said he hopes existing and future Maritime Park revenue would be able to pay for the project, but first the city needs to know what’s even possible with Blue Wahoos Stadium.
“We can't give an educated opinion on that until we know what's possible,” Reeves said. “This is just the very start of the snowball to see if this is worth putting some more effort into.”
Jim Little is the City Government Accountability Reporter for the Pensacola News Journal. If you have a news tip, please send it to [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Could Blue Wahoos Stadium be used for USL soccer? Study is in the works.
Continue reading...
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves told the News Journal that the city will conduct a feasibility study into converting Blue Wahoos Stadium to host a soccer team along with the Minor League Baseball team.
“This is a feasibility study in every form of the word,” Reeves said. “Is this idea even possible? And if it turns out it is, then we can take another step.”
USL plays in other minor league stadiums
Several USL soccer teams share their stadiums with baseball teams, including Blue Wahoos' rival, the Knoxville Smokies, which shares the new Covenant Health Park with One Knoxville SC, a USL League One team.
USL, which has multiple levels, has been expanding in recent years as part of a plan to create a Division I league in 2028 that would compete for the same level of players as Major League Soccer. As part of that, it has been looking to start more teams at the Division III level, which is USL League One.
USL's strategy is locating teams in mixed-use entertainment districts with apartments, hotels, retail shops and restaurants, much like has been proposed for the future of the Community Maritime Park.
USL signed a one-year exclusivity agreement with Pensacola in March 2025 to search for a stadium site and entertainment district site, and while that agreement has expired, Reeves said USL is still interested in Pensacola.
Blue Wahoos Stadium regularly hosted football games when it was the home of the University of West Florida football team and regularly hosts the annual youth football games known as the Soul Bowl. Previous setups for football had the field running east-west, but professional soccer generally requires a north-south orientation to avoid goalies having to defend while looking directly into the sun.
Initially, Wahoos Stadium wasn’t in contention as a location, as conversations were about finding a new location for a stadium, but no locations have materialized. Also, as renovation plans for the Pensacola Bay Center move forward, any idea of using bed tax funds appears off the table.
Wahoos Stadium will need renovation regardless
Reeves had publicly ruled out Wahoos Stadium, but seeing other USL teams play in Minor League ballparks shifted his view, particularly since the city has started to have internal conversations about needed updates to Wahoos Stadium by the time the next lease renewal comes up in six years.
“There was kind of just a light bulb moment of saying, well, we're looking for a downtown location that's got developable property nearby to fit this USL model; we already have a stadium now,” Reeves said. “In a perfect world, if this could work, you'd have one stadium to maintain instead of two. It would be significantly less expensive to the taxpayer to renovate an existing stadium and turn it multi-use than you would to build a completely new separate facility that would now have to be maintained.”
When the baseball team’s lease comes up for renewal for Blue Wahoos Stadium in 2032, the stadium will be 20 years old, and Reeves said any stadium at 20 years is going to require “substantive maintenance," such as replacing all of the stadium seats.
Blue Wahoos Stadium's location and orientation on the manmade peninsula that is Maritime Park is directly exposed to the saltwater breeze coming off Pensacola Bay, which adds additional abuse to the stadium's infrastructure.
How would soccer work at Wahoos Stadium?
Covenant Health Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, was built as a multipurpose field for both baseball and soccer and features a retractable baseball mound. That stadium crew of 10 people takes as long as 12 hours to convert from baseball to soccer and spends at least $7,000 each time, but that stadium uses real grass, and sod has to be laid down for each conversion.
Blue Wahoos Stadium went to artificial turf in 2022, and USL allows games to be played on artificial turf.
USL requires a minimum field size of 110 yards by 70 yards, which will fit the field on a north-south orientation. The layout would give the seats along the first-base line the best views of the game.
Reeves said the feasibility study would look at those issues, how it would work and what it would cost, along with the costs of other improvements that will be needed at Wahoos Stadium, whether or not it gets converted to a multipurpose field.
The cost of the study will be between $35,000 and $45,000, and Reeves is searching for a consulting firm to conduct it.
How updates to Blue Wahoos Stadium and the conversion project would be paid for remains an open question. The most obvious source of funds would be the Community Redevelopment Agency, which took over management of the Maritime Park development in 2017.
Reeves said he hopes existing and future Maritime Park revenue would be able to pay for the project, but first the city needs to know what’s even possible with Blue Wahoos Stadium.
“We can't give an educated opinion on that until we know what's possible,” Reeves said. “This is just the very start of the snowball to see if this is worth putting some more effort into.”
Jim Little is the City Government Accountability Reporter for the Pensacola News Journal. If you have a news tip, please send it to [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Could Blue Wahoos Stadium be used for USL soccer? Study is in the works.
Continue reading...
