Whitecaps president Bob Lenarduzzi, then just a 15-year-old, was runner-up for the Soccer Boy trophy in the 1970 Sun Tournament of Champions played at the iconic Burnaby field.
Eighteen years later, he played his last professional game there in leading the Vancouver 86ers to a league championship.
Vancouver Whitecaps captain Martin Nash remembers winning a provincial championship at Swangard as a kid and later making his international debut for Canada there in a 1997 game against El Salvador.
One of his fondest memories as a professional was winning the 2008 USL-1 league title at Swangard in front of a passionate home crowd.
But after calling the aging-but-still-great-looking Boundary and Kingsway stadium home for the past 23 years, the Whitecaps are moving on.
Empire Field and BC Place beckon next year as the Caps move up to Major League Soccer and crowds in the 20,000 range — compared with Swangard’s capacity of 5,288.
The Whitecaps play their last regular-season game at Swangard against the Portland Timbers next weekend and will host at least one playoff game after that before closing the door on their Swangard experience.
It has, indeed, been a memorable experience, with four consecutive Canadian Soccer League titles between 1988 and 1991 and USL-1 championship seasons in 2006 and 2008.
“I feel a little melancholy about the move,” Lenarduzzi said. “Swangard has always been consistent as a great little place to play. Any team that comes here always glows about the condition of the field and the atmosphere and the backdrop of the trees.”
Nash said Swangard’s playing field is arguably the best soccer pitch in North America right now.
“It has been the best place to play soccer in B.C. for a long time,” he said.
The 400-metre track that surrounds the field can detract from the fan experience by keeping spectators a little further away. But the club has tried to counter that by bringing people closer to the action on three sides of the field.
“But there’s only so much you can do and they were always going to move to a new facility at some point,” Nash said. “It served its purpose for a long time but they need a bigger stadium.”
Vancouver Southsiders supporters club president John Knox, who has cheered the 86ers and Whitecaps at Swangard since they began play there in 1987, has mixed feelings about the move to a bigger facility.
“Swangard is a very picturesque location to watch a game and it makes for a great evening,” he said. “I’ll miss the sense of community you get in a small stadium, where I’ve seen the same people at every game over the past 10 to 15 years. It’s almost like we’ve grown up together.”
Knox said it will be hard to replicate that sense of community in a bigger stadium but feels the club had to move downtown to build a stronger soccer culture, like the Seattle Sounders have done by playing at Qwest Field.
“Successful teams have to be downtown where there is close access to pubs and restaurants and all those things that really foster a football supporters culture,” he said. “Pubs literally have to be right across the street.”
There are few food and beverage options literally right across the street from Swangard and no obvious Pre-Game or post-game fan gathering place has emerged over the years.
Minoas Taverna restaurant, operated by the Chronakis family for the past 24 years, gets a bump in business on game days because it is located close to the stadium on Kingsway. But owner Georgia Chronakis said the revenue boost isn’t huge.
“We get anywhere from six to 10 regulars who come here for dinner before the games and we’ll miss them,” she said.
Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan isn’t sold on the popular notion that successful sports franchises have to move downtown. He said his city tried to convince the Whitecaps to stay in an expanded and renovated Swangard Stadium but the lure of downtown Vancouver outweighed anything Burnaby could offer.
“It’s all about corporate boxes and corporate sponsorship so downtown is the way to obtain those kinds of things,” Corrigan said. “But the actual people who go to these games tend to live in the suburbs.”
He estimates Swangard could have been renovated and upgraded to MLS standards for less than $100 million and noted the stadium looked “tremendous” when $1.6 million was spent on it to temporarily boost its capacity to 10,000 for the FIFA U-20 World Cup in 2007.
Corrigan said Burnaby has been a big supporter of the Whitecaps over the years, adopting the squad as its “hometown team” and working with the club as it went through various financial problems.
.