2.3 Acres of the Beautiful Game

How students at the University of Texas are finding community on a historic field on campus

By Clay Standridge

The 2.3 acres of Caven-Clark field at night - Courtesy of UT RecSports

March 31, 2022 - Even before the great Pelè popularized the term “o jogo bonito” – the beautiful game – soccer had built the largest community in the world. Now, almost half of the earth's population watches, with over 3.5 billion people tuning into the 2018 World Cup. Of those people watching, over 250 million people actually play the game.

Yet, in this massive faction of lovers of this beautiful game, many people still struggle to find an active community within the sport. For dozens of soccer players at the University of Texas at Austin, Caven-Clark field has become a place to find that community.

“It’s nice to come out and play something more informal where there are always people and nobody’s judging you,” said Julia Paraskevas, a freshman biochemistry major at the university. “I’ve never had something like that before that’s so accessible.”

There is a spirit and resilience with the students who come to play on the 2.3 acres of turf at Caven-Clark field. On this night, there were only three of them. Despite the lack of numbers, they still smiled and laughed as they kicked the ball in a small triangle.

The field has lived a somewhat nomadic life. It has been the site of UT athletics since 1887, seeing use from the UT baseball, football and track teams before three location changes. It has now settled on the corner of San Jacinto Boulevard and Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Caven-Clark field, then Clark Field, before it moved in 1928 – Courtesy of the Daily Texan

The itinerant existence of the field aptly mirrors the life of the soccer players at the field. Bouncing from place to place before finding a home nestled on the southeast corner of campus. The night they were interviewed, they had been relegated to the ends of the field thanks to a UT lacrosse practice but were happy to play on any patch of artificial grass they could find.

“There are some attempts to organize things, but honestly, I just come out here whenever I want and there are always games going on,” says Jake Wilson, a freshman acting major. “It’s super important that we’ve got this space where we can all come play.”

However, when the field gets busier their sport becomes something like a language. UT is home to nearly 2,000 international students from 140 different countries, so words can often fail. But soccer, football, futebol, futtobōru, whatever it may be called, can make up for any lingual misalignment.

“I think soccer is such an international sport and UT is such an international school, so I’m playing with people from all over the world. We play with guys from Paraguay, from Brazil and Spain,” says Wilson, smiling. “It's really cool that you get to meet people from different parts of the world, and this is where all the meetups happen and it’s just through this sport.”

UT is a massive school with tens of thousands of students and hundreds of sub-communities. It’s tough for someone to feel accepted by anything when they feel like everyone around them is a part of a different thing. But there’s some comfort found in these students finding community on a mere 5% of the mighty 40 acres of UT.

“I’m not in a frat, I don’t do clubs or anything like that,” Wilson says, thoughtfully. “But just coming out here, you’ll meet really cool people. You see the same people all the time, they’re all really nice guys. It’s a good sense of community.”