As a direct-mail newspaper that only hits mailboxes every four weeks, it’s hard for us to publish some stories because they’re already “old” by the time our next issue reaches you.
For example, by the time this issue reaches you, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa will all be distant memories and the year 2025 will already be in full swing, as even the kids will be back in school the same day this issue is scheduled to reach you.
Even so, photographer Charmaine George and I attended many of the local holiday-themed events last month — some or even all of which you may have missed — including two different local performances of “The Nutcracker,” the annual New Tampa Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah lighting events and even the unique second-annual Renaissance-era “Madrigal Dinner” hosted by the Freedom High chorus at the New Tampa Performing Arts Center, which isn’t specifically a holiday event, but which was held on December 5 and included an actual delicious dinner for those who attended.
The two photos above are from the New Tampa Dance Theatre’s “preview” performance on Dec. 7 at the Shops at Wiregrass. Charmaine took these pictures since neither she nor I were available to attend NTDT’s full “Nutcracker” ballet performances at the University of South Florida Dec. 20-22. Charmaine said that the huge crowd of people at the mall was definitely captivated by the ballet.
I took the three photos above during one of the Tampa City Ballet (TCB)’s three performances of “The Nutcracker” at the New Tampa Performing Arts Center (NTPAC) Dec. 13-15. Not only were the dancers (adults and children) all amazing, the choreography by TCB’s Paula Nunez, as well as the costumes and sets, were all as impressive as you would see at any big-city ballet company performance of Tchaikovsky’s holiday masterpiece. TCB also performed “The Nutcracker” at USF Dec. 7-10.
I had really hoped to attend Freedom High’s Madrigal Dinner at NTPAC (see the left photo and the photo below) but Charmaine said it was super-fun, with great singing, funny skits and a delicious dinner of chicken parmesan and salad, plus tiramisu for dessert.
On Dec. 2, the City of Tampa’s New Tampa Recreation Center and Parks & Recreation Department hosted the annual Christmas tree lighting event and parade (photos below) and a nice crowd of around 200 people attended to participate and watch the youth dance performances, enjoy the lighting ceremony and spend a little quality time with Santa Claus himself!
And finally, on Dec. 26 (the second night of Hanukkah), the New Tampa Rec Center also hosted the second annual Hanukkah menorah lighting event, which featured prayers, songs and a wonderful message delivered by Rabbi Mendy Yarmush of Chabad of Wiregrass, which is now the only Jewish congregation in New Tampa or Wesley Chapel. Both the Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations at the Rec Center were organized in part by District 7 Tampa City Council member Luis Viera.
Freedom High’s Madrigal DinnerChristmas Tree Lighting Event and ParadeChristmas Tree Lighting Event and ParadeHanukkah Menorah LightingHanukkah Menorah Lighting
Townhalls and other community meetings may sound boring to many, but sometimes, they produce action that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Alexandra Gilmore, a Tampa Palms resident since 2007, attended one hosted by Tampa City Council member Luis Viera and other city planners back in 2020 and when she took the mic, she wanted to know why there weren’t more — or any, actually — public basketball courts in New Tampa.
Her boys, Caleb and Bryce, had searched for places to play, but were always booted off the courts.
“You have to live in a community that has them, or a certain neighborhood, or have a membership somewhere,” Alexandra remembers telling city officials. She told Viera and the others there were courts and space behind Liberty Middle School that could be used but were fenced off to keep kids out.
“Why can’t those be public?,” she asked.
It was a great question, and one that finally got answered on Aug. 25, when the Tampa City Council voted 5-0 to pitch in with the Hillsborough County School District to spend $1 million to upgrade the aged tennis courts behind Liberty.
Gilmore had no idea her suggestion had even become a reality until the Neighborhood News called her.
“Oh my goodness,” she said. “You’re kidding me! This is absolutely amazing!”
Gilmore stayed in touch with Viera via email while the councilman did the pushing behind the scenes to initiate the project. The Tampa City Council agreed to enter into an interlocal agreement with the School District to improve some of the athletic facilities that adjoin Liberty and Freedom High.
The current facilities — six hard court tennis courts — between the two schools will receive a new design and a court cover to shield those playing from the elements.
The “all-fields facility,” as it is called, will feature three resurfaced and outfitted courts for basketball, tennis, pickleball or volleyball, depending on the needs. The other three existing tennis courts will be replaced by an artificial multi-purpose turf field and will be covered. Restrooms also will be a part of the new facility.
The School District will control access to the fields and their usage — most likely for recess and other school-related activities — during daytime hours when Liberty and Freedom are in session. The city will control public access in the evening hours and on weekends.
“Utilizing unused school space for recreation activities for the larger communities, including basketball…is going to be a great thing,” said Viera, who represents the New Tampa area in District 7.
The cost of upgrading the courts is expected to be roughly $1 million, and the City Council voted that the city would pay up to 50 percent, or $500,000, of those costs, using Capital Improvement Plan funds.
During the public comments portion of the City Council meeting, only one person, South Tampa’s Stephanie Poynter, commented and she was in favor of making the courts open to the public.
“If the City of Tampa is paying half for the basketball courts at Liberty and Freedom schools, those courts should be accessible 24 hours a day if the schools are not in session,” she said. “This is the only place I have ever lived where every single school has a fence between it and the kids who live around it. I’ll never understand that.”
Before the vote took place, the motion was pulled for discussion by District 3 Council member Lynn Hurtak. She favored the interlocal agreement, and asked that the city’s Parks & Recreation Department explore more opportunities like this.
“How when many of us when we were kids, that at our neighborhood school, after school, we could go play on the playground, in the field, on the basketball courts, do it on the weekends, do it all summer?,” Hurtak asked. “Now, with the advent of school shootings, many of those open spaces have been fenced off for student security, and they don’t allow the public to utilize those facilities, which is a bigger strain on our parks system. So, when I saw this interlocal agreement, I was really excited about it. “
Viera made a point of crediting Gilmore during the meeting.
“This is going to be a wonderful thing,” Viera told the Council.
Gilmore agrees.
“I remember a couple of people reached out to me after that meeting in 2020 to thank me,” said Gilmore, who was running for the Hillsborough County School Board at the time. “This will be great for kids in the local neighborhoods to have a place to play.”
The much-anticipated and long-awaited expansion of the New Tampa Recreation Center (NTRC) in Tampa Palms, which dates all the way back to the day the facility debuted in 2008 with a waiting list of more than 1,000 kids, has finally come to fruition.
Today at 3:30 p.m., almost two years to the day of the expansion’s groundbreaking on April 12, 2019, the NTRC will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony and reopen with 7,300 square feet of extra space, featuring three new rooms (convertible to five, with partitions) that will provide new space for gymnastics and dance instruction, community meetings, adult and senior fitness classes and athletic training.
The expansion cost roughly $2.6-million, after years of budget battles that saw the long-planned project get passed over in 2012 and again in 2016.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Tampa City Council member Luis Viera, who as the District 7 Council member, helped rally New Tampa residents, led by Tampa Palms attorney Tracy Falkowitz, to show up at the budget deliberations in 2017 and implore the Council to keep the money in the budget for the project.
The end result will expand not only the NTRC’s profile, but also its reach.
“We’re known for gymnastics and dance classes, but the expansion makes us more than that,” said Heather Wolf-Erickson, the athletics, aquatics and special facilities manager for the City of Tampa’s Parks & Recreation Department, who took us on a tour of the new add-on prior to the March 3 opening. “Kids are one aspect of a family, but we also wanted to give the parents that sit here during the practices an opportunity to do some fitness classes and other things, too.”
Wolf-Erickson also is excited about offering classes for older residents, as well as space for community gatherings and meetings. All of that will be available in the first multi-purpose room you pass upon entering the expanded facility, which has a partition to give it more flexibility to host two classes at once.
“We can get a little more creative with what we can offer (now),” Wolf-Erickson says.
The “fun” room
Next to that room is what Wolf-Erickson calls the “fun” room — a new mini-gym for those just starting out in gymnastics, typically ages 5-and-below.
The space was designed for “the littles” who, until now, had to share space with the bigger kids in the NTRC’s large 12,500-sq.-ft. main gymnasium. Now, instead of being lost in a forest of taller gymnasts, the younger kids have a great new space of their own.
“It’s easy to get distracted (in the main gymnastics area),” said Linda Hall, Site Supervisor II for the City of Tampa. “When the big kids are in there, they’re doing big kid (moves) and it’s easy (for the younger kids) to get distracted.”
Also making the new room unique is the equipment itself, like the rings and parallel bars, which are smaller to fit smaller hands. And, an inflatable trampoline and foam ball pit are used for practicing jumping and flipping.
“Everything is catered to them,” Wolf-Erickson says of the new room. “We’re not teaching them any big gymnastic moves in here, we’re working on upper-body strength, hand-eye coordination and patience. When kids have fun learning and doing physical things, they’re more apt to come back.”
Adjustable Batting Cage, Too
Wolf-Erickson says her favorite room is the 1,760-sq.-ft. rectangular training “box,” which resembles popular, more rustic training facilities that look like warehouses, with large fans, a garage door that opens and even a batting cage that is stored above the floor and can be lowered with the press of a button.
Baseball and softball athletes will be the obvious beneficiaries of the batting cage, but when the cage is suspended above the floor, the area can be used for almost any kind of training, from football to soccer to any kind of fitness and weight training. It also will come in handy on rainy days.
“This space is going to get used and used and used,” Wolf-Erickson said. “When designing it, they asked, ‘What are you going to do there?’ We said we’ll show you. It’s just a little bit more different than what we’ve done here. (This room) will be more open to the community.”
While technically part of the NTRC expansion, the training box is practically its own separate space. It has its own climate control, separate from the rest of the facility, and the door leading in from the rest of the expanded spaces can be locked down, with a door leading outside (and inside, monitored by a keypad) for those who are training later than regular building hours.
“We can have this open 24/7 without impacting the staffing requirement,” Wolf-Erickson said. “It is its own space, with its own restroom. It was pretty well thought out.”
In fact, all three of the new spaces have their own restrooms, and there will be another bathroom that can be accessed from the playground, a touch sure to be appreciated by parents.
The two rooms with dance and gymnastics also have multiple large windows for parents to watch their children, similar to the rooms in the main building.
After years of having to turn folks away, or at least put them on a waiting list that had as many as 1,800 kids on it, Wolf-Erickson hopes the new space gets children off the waiting lists and helps free up more room for more students to sign up. Pre-Covid, the NTRC had more than 4,000 class slots programmed each week, and saw nearly 8,000 gymnasts and dancers receive training every year at the popular facility.
Wolf-Erickson said she wants to see the community, from beginners all the way to seniors, utilize the facility for exercise, training and other events. While all those things may be offered at other places in the area, Wolf-Erickson says the plans for the pricing and community memberships at the NTRC are still being finalized, “But we believe it should be affordable, and we won’t be out-priced here,” she says.
For more info, call (813) 975-2794 or visit Tampa.Gov/parks-and-recreation/activities-recreation/gym-and-dance/new-tampa-center.
Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has presented her annual budget proposal to the Tampa City Council — via a socially distant video conference, naturally — and the news was mostly good for New Tampa.
The Fiscal Year 2021 budget didn’t raise property taxes, or cut any essential services, and there were no layoffs.
But, the $1.254 billion plan included a big surprise: Money for the New Tampa Sensory & Autism Friendly Park, or Inclusive Park, which Tampa City Council member Luis Viera had all but given up on a few months ago, due to the city’s anticipated financial shortfall due to Covid-19.
“I knew due to the economy there would be a scaling back of priorities, and there has been,” says Viera, whose District 7 includes most of New Tampa. “But I was pleasantly surprised to see it in there.”
The budget, Tampa’s biggest ever, includes $1.7 million to build the Inclusive Park just behind the New Tampa Recreation Center (see story on pg. 6). While Tampa has made a number of improvements in recent years, with playground equipment that makes the parks more accessible to children with autism, including the NTRC’s Community Park, this full-fledged autism/sensory park will be the first of its kind in the city.
Roughly $90,000, from the 2018 budget, was used to design the park, originally planned for the area behind BJ’s Wholesale Club, also in Tampa Palms.
“It’s a huge win for New Tampa kids with disabilities, as well for the city of Tampa,” says Viera, who made the autism park one of his first goals when he was elected in 2016. “I’m thrilled they didn’t put the brakes on the project. Under Mayor Castor’s administration, you can see they are trying to take a positive stand in regards to persons with special needs. It’s great to see.”
Castor says the pandemic has cost the city $24 million in revenues. She also says she has no plans to cut from the police budget, which is roughly $175 Castor, Tampa’s Police Chief from 2009-15, said her plan was to invest, not divest, even in the wake of nationwide demands that police spending is reevaluated and reduced following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. Castor’s budget must be approved by the City Council by Oct. 1. — JCC
Matt May’s photography will be one of the highlights of the New Tampa Recreation Center’s expansion, which currently is under construction in Tampa Palms. (Photo: Charmaine George)
When the New Tampa Recreation Center (NTRC) was built in 2007, Tampa’s Matt May was commissioned to photograph some of the area gymnasts to adorn the windows at the new facility.
Now, 12 years later, the NTRC is just about finished with its $3-million expansion, and once again, it is May’s photography that will be among the highlights of the new structure.
The 7,300-sq.-ft. expansion will help the NTRC accommodate more of those gymnasts, as well as those in the city’s popular dance programs. The two programs served a combined 1,200 students (pre-Covid), and the additional space will allow those numbers to increase by roughly 25 percent when full capacity is again allowed.
Five panels of May’s photography will line a wall in the lobby of the new expansion, and will look like something you would typically see entering a professional sports complex or Hall of Fame. The images show gymnasts, ranging in age from 7 to 17, performing flips and other maneuvers. The large glass panels were put into place at the rec center July 29, as May watched like a nervous and proud parent.
However, these aren’t your ordinary images. May’s photos have been transformed with the use of ceramic inks that are printed onto inch-thick glass, which is then tempered so the inks become a permanent part of the glass.
“This is a new medium for me,” May admits. “The technology has gotten to a point where we could pull this off. Over time, you won’t have to worry about Florida’s heat or UV rays fading that image. To be able to put something in a window in Florida and have it last the test of time, at this level of detail, is really something that has only just become possible over the last year or so.”
May is a local sports photographer, who also shot the first studio pictures of new Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ quarterback Tom Brady in the team’s new uniforms. He also shot new tight end Rob Gronkowski after he joined the Bucs.
May also shot ad campaigns for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 2019 and, back in 2017, produced the art for the Bucs’ “Siege the Day” campaign.
He says he approached shooting the new pictures for the New Tampa Rec Center the same way, employing the same studio-lit pro action style.
“About a year ago, we set up here in the gym, using a black backdrop, and I photographed some of the young gymnasts just like I would Tom Brady or other pro athletes or sports teams,” May says. “I was not only showcasing their personalities, hard work and athletic ability, but also their confidence.”
The NTRC expansion is expected to be completed this fall. Prior to the pandemic, the facility boasted a waiting list of 1,400 kids — 960 waiting to get into gymnastics, the rest waiting to get into the center’s dance programs.
The expansion will add a 50’ x 40’ room specifically for children ages 5 and under, who currently have to share space with older kids in the existing 12,500-sq.-ft. gymnastics area.
Another 50’ x 40’ all-purpose room for dance also is being added, and the expansion also will include a 1,760-sq.-ft. “training box,” which will offer a wealth of possible training exercises for a variety of sports, like retractable batting cages and small group fitness classes.
District 7 Tampa City Council member Luis Viera, who helped lead the charge to get the expansion funded after years of budget disappointments as New Tampa’s representative on the Council, was on hand as the panels were fitted into place and found them to be a fitting touch for the new building.
“I think it’s amazing,” Viera said. “It really improves the existing location, and is consistent with what I think the community wanted to see.”
