Youth sports and the fields: the funds, and who uses them

One league’s payments, as the district listed them

The only user group whose payments the archive holds — because it is the one we asked for first, not because it is unusual. A workbook the district’s business office typed in answer to a records request, September 2026. Grouped by fiscal year as the district groups them — the 8 July 2024 receipt sits under FY24 although the date is in FY25. One row carries a pasted record from the accounting system.

The funds, from the town’s books

The town’s FY26 special-revenue report as of March 31, 2026 — a printout from the accounting system, so these are evidence in the sense this site uses the word. Credits print negative on the report and are shown here as amounts; the four columns are the ones the report’s own arithmetic identifies (opening + revenue − spent = available, to the cent, for every fund), because the export’s header row has fewer labels than its rows have columns. The opening balance is the FY2025 close.

Fund 1306 is the school department’s facilities-use revolving fund; 1545 the turf fund; 1500 the Parks Commission’s own revolving fund, which runs separate fields on a separate contract and is here only because it is the other field money in town; 1301 the athletics fund whose full cash journal the archive holds — and which carries no receipt from any youth league, which is how the search for these payments started.

The facilities-use fund, FY2011 to FY2024, as the annual reports print it

Receipts and disbursements, read off each year’s special-revenue schedule. Transcribed, not verified: the pages’ own totals do not reconcile in any year, so this is the shape of the fund and not a figure to quote. The FY2018 report prints a carried balance its own row does not support. The FY2024 report prints only a balance — $3,010.67 at 30 June 2024 — and the FY26 report opens the fund at $65,241.82 a year later; FY2025 itself is the year the archive cannot see.

What the fund pays for, as the district describes it

Asked what maintaining the school fields costs, the Superintendent wrote that the district outsources maintenance of the grass playing fields and “we have covered that expense from the Facility Revolving account. That is the account that field rental fees are deposited into.” These are her figures, from an email, read back from FY24 budget requests — not a printout from the books (rule 13a), and the fund’s own FY2024 expenditure is not in the archive to check them against.

What the boards have said

From the recordings’ machine captions — a finding aid, not a record. Each line opens the video at the moment.

• School Committee, December 3, 2014 · 1:39:46$1,800 to replace soccer goals owned by youth soccer, taken when the league moved its practices off the high school fields.
• Select Board, May 3, 2016 · 1:36:05The turf replacement funding plan: $30,000 a year from the cell tower, $15,000 a year from Lunenburg Youth Soccer and $7,500 from the Bengals, “to achieve the goal of paying for the replacement of the field over its lifetime.”
• Select Board, October 10, 2017 · 0:26:27“They cut us a check every season” — the Bengals and youth soccer paying a set fee toward the turf bond.
• School Committee, November 16, 2017 · 1:31:17Field costs moved out of the operating budget into facilities-use funding, with the money received from youth soccer for the fields going there.
• Select Board, March 5, 2019 · 1:06:17“Are some of the organizations like Lunenburg Youth Soccer really associated with the public schools, or are they just Lunenburg-based sports organizations?”
• School Committee, May 22, 2019 · 2:01:00Reworking the facilities-use rates: “we were collecting a lot more from Lunenburg Youth Soccer than we might otherwise need.”
• School Committee, September 4, 2019 · 1:30:03Youth soccer’s fall field requests “didn’t closely match up with what I expected as far as number of hours.”
• Finance Committee, February 17, 2022 · 1:51:44“Talk to the presidents of Lunenburg Bengals, Lunenburg Youth Soccer Association, Lunenburg Youth Basketball Association — all these organizations that use our facilities.”
• School Committee, August 31, 2022 · 0:08:16The athletic and facilities directors working out schedules with the leaders of youth soccer and the Bengals; a shared two-week look-ahead for every field.

The leagues

The town’s Parks Commission page lists 4, “provided as a courtesy and not run or managed by the Parks Commission”: Ayer-Shirley-Lunenburg Bengals; Lunenburg Little League (Baseball and Softball); Lunenburg Youth Soccer Association; Lunenburg Jr Basketball. A contact list, not a list of renters: it does not say who uses a field, on what terms, or that these are all of them — and one is a basketball programme. Only one of the four has a records-request answer in this archive, and it is the one we asked for first.

• Who else pays into fund 1306, and how much: the fund’s journal detail (the report the archive holds for fund 1301) would list every receipt by payer.
• What happened in FY2025: the fund stood at $3,010.67 on 30 June 2024 (the annual report) and at $65,241.82 on 30 June 2025 (the FY26 report’s opening balance), and nothing in the archive shows the year’s receipts and spending — the FY2025 special-revenue report would.
• Whether the $45,000 a year in the turf fund is still $30,000 of cell-tower rent and $15,000 from youth soccer, as described in 2016, and where the Bengals’ $7,500 goes.
• What the fields cost the town to keep. The schools’ grounds, custodial and utility costs are coded to no programme.