Recently, Roseville High School has been undergoing construction on a new auxiliary gym. The new building is located on top of the old parking lot behind the Moeller Gym. This lot served staff during the day and athletics spectators in the evenings.

While there was an occasional soccer or basketball game overlap, the parking lot relieved the stress of crowding the surrounding neighborhood and prevented further parking conflicts. With this lot gone, Roseville’s parking problem has worsened with soccer, wrestling and basketball events occuring on the same night. Occasionally parents and students who come to attend have to park blocks away from the school.

Basketball player KJ Turpin believes that it gives the school a bad look and creates an issue when opponents have to park far from the school.

“When the opposing teams come it’s inconvenient, especially when they have to walk down the alley and from the neighborhood,” Turpin said. “It just looks bad that we are hosting them and we don’t have parking for them.”

Varsity boys soccer player senior Cameron Belton experiences troubles with parking almost every home game and feels that opponents having to park far is unfair. He believes that the school needs to focus on solutions for this problem and thinks that reserving spots for athletes might be a viable alternative.  

“They come here, they are showing up here to play us, and it isn’t right. Now it starts to look bad on us,” Belton said. “A solution could be to reserve certain spots around the field and gym. Soccer could get spots reserved in the senior lot and basketball gets the spots reserved in the front or admin lot, since it is a lot closer to the gym for the basketball players than soccer players.”

Since players arrive at games so early before, it doesn’t always affect them. Spectators, though, are the ones who are predominantly affected. For parents who have to come from work or don’t get there early, they are stuck parking blocks from the gym or field. 

Roseville’s administrative assistant Melinda Jordan has a senior at Roseville who’s on the wrestling team. Working for the school she knows how bad parking can get, but understands how much of an inconvenience it can be for the opponents’ parents.

“I usually go at least 45 minutes early for parking, since I do not like to park far and walk in the dark. I just know how the parking is, so I plan for it,” Jordan said. “I have had some conversations with the opponents families and they question the parking situation, but once I explain that our school is over 100 years old, back then the planning for this school did not account on over 2,000 students… it is what it is.”