5280 Magazine – May 2018

62 |^5280 |^ MAY 20^18

CULTURE

he most prominent structure in Grand County

sits like a giant dollop of whipped cream atop a

windswept ridge above Granby. From far away,

you might mistake it for a massive wedding tent,

a temporary space to fete some Kardashian or

Mnuchin or other ersatz American royalty. But

this is flyover country for those folks, and the

structure is not an event space.

Or, rather, it’s not the kind of event space

you might imagine when you irst see it. his is

my hometown’s $600,000 indoor soccer ield, as improbable a

building as exists in any rural Colorado county. Ten years ago

it was a vacant lot owned by the East Grand School District.

But since 2008, thanks to a partnership between the district, the

town, the Grand County Soccer Club, and an anonymous donor

whose generosity gives the whole thing an intriguing air of mys-

tery, the dome has become a place of peculiar magic, capable

even of making the invisible visible.

MY LEGS ALWAYS HAVE BEEN TOO short for my athletic ambitions

and yet, at 62, I continue to play soccer. I love the civilizing

inluence of the game’s 17 laws that promote fair play (yellow

T

The Big Tent

How an indoor soccer field is bringing Grand County’s increasingly

diverse population together. BY MARTIN J. SMITH

Shout

card infractions include “unsporting behavior” and “deliberately

leaving the ield of play without the referee’s permission”) and

the inevitable camaraderie of teammates from a wide variety of

backgrounds. I moved to Granby in 2016 after three decades

in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California,

where the 22 players on my Palos Verdes United team came

from 11 countries. Not surprisingly, I’ve learned to swear com-

petently in several languages.

One of my biggest hesitations about moving to rural Colorado

was the thought of leaving behind that vibrant ethnic mashup.

Eighty-eight percent of the people in Grand County are white,

like me. But if the statistics in last May’s “State of Grand County

Economy” report, by Innovation Economy Partners, are accurate,

that’s changing fast. Grand County’s white population has grown

by only 10 percent since 2000, while the minority population has

increased by 93 percent. he Hispanic population, in particular, is

projected to grow by 54 percent in the next seven years.

hat demographic pattern is repeated across rural Colorado

and the West. Headwaters Economics, a nonproit research

group in Bozeman, Montana, recently studied trends in 278

rural counties in 11 Western states and found that minority

populations have grown in 99 percent of those counties during