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When the playground at St. Vartan Park closed for renovations this spring, parents in Murray Hill rallied around one question: Where will the children go to play?

“We thought, well, at least we have the field next to it,” said Rebecca Webber, a 51-year-old mother from the neighborhood. “And every evening we would get sort of ushered off the field by an organization that had a permit.”

Across the East River, at Pier 5 of Brooklyn Bridge Park , a group of eight high school soccer players filmed a public plea addressed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Instagram.

“Mamdani! Three fields, three permits, this is crazy ,” they said. “We just want to play and now we have to go home. … We propose that one field should be open at all times!”

At New York City’s hundreds of public ballfields and soccer pitches, casual pick-up players are feeling the squeeze as demand surges for organized games, practices and sports clinics. But even those with the persistence and resources to score a permit don’t feel like winners. League and club operators say they, too, are struggling to get enough field time as interest in recreational sports explodes.

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The Parks Department permitted 48% more daily reservations for organized sports on public athletic fields in 2025 than a decade ago, according to public and internal Parks Department permit data obtained and analyzed by The City Reporter and data visualization site The Pudding . Nearly 1,850 organizations secured permits — roughly 310 more than in 2015.

The proliferation of recreational leagues and sports clinics has at times pitted older neighborhood teams against new entrants in a struggle for field time. In East Williamsburg, for example, longtime residents who’d been playing softball at Sternberg Park for five decades were surprised to learn last year that one of their weeknight league permits had been denied to make space for another group.

“Before, no one wanted this park. It was in bad conditions,” said Hector Perez, who moved to the neighborhood from Puerto Rico as a kid and now plays in the 55-and-up Los Abuelos league. In 2021, the Parks Department unveiled a new artificial turf field at Sternberg Park. That same year, Williamsburg ranked second citywide for new housing construction over the previous decade.

“And now, after the neighborhood’s been gentrified, everybody wants to play here,” he continued. “But we’ve been here the longest.”

On weekends, the park still throngs with cheers as the old-timers compete against one another, while free food is laid out for the crowd ringing the field, folding chairs galore.

“We’ve kept the spirit of baseball going — to not forget our culture — because this is all gentrified, and this is the little bit that we have left,” Perez said.

But amid the growing competition for fields, even the big leagues have struggled with permitting.

“It remains the single most frustrating aspect of this job,” said Tarek Pertew, founder and CEO of NYC Footy, the largest adult recreational soccer league and for-profit permit holder in the city.