A New Era of Community and Sports in San Francisco

Kristin Hagan Sprincin, who grew up in Marin County and played competitive volleyball through Trinity College in Connecticut, has seen her share of high-end gymnasiums across the country. However, none of them compare to the Herz Recreation Center in San Francisco. On a Sunday morning, she was sitting in the stands watching her son Patrick play futsal, or indoor soccer, at the new facility.

“We love this place,” said Hagan Sprincin, who had driven from her home in Pacific Heights to the $26 million indoor facility in McLaren Park on the south edge of the city. “It is just amazing to be in a facility with so many options.”

The stripes on the new hardwood floor designate separate boundaries for three levels of basketball, volleyball, and futsal. Futsal has become so popular that when Herz opened on January 9, 20 teams were able to come off the waiting list, meaning 220 kids had a place to play. The excitement was palpable, with Patrick, 9, having jitters for his first game and his twin sister, Katherine, feeling the thrill while watching from the elevated stands.

“I like how inviting and clean it always is,” she said while watching her brother play.

Hertz Rec Center not only fills a need for youth indoor soccer but also addresses a long-standing recreational need in the community. It predates the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department’s Jose Coronado Futsal League, which has been around for 27 years.

“The community has been asking for this gym for decades,” said co-project manager Alexis Ward, who oversaw community meetings with the Sunnydale and Visitacion Valley constituencies. Most of these meetings were conducted over Zoom during the COVID-19 lockdown. People dialed in over Zoom to request outdoor exercise equipment for adults and a picnic area as part of the plan, but the main thing they asked for was just to get it built to get the underprivileged kids living in subsidized housing in Sunnydale and Visitacion Valley off the streets.

“People called in during COVID and said, ‘This facility will save lives,'” said co-project manager Eoanna Goodwin.

The resulting gym is the first to be built in a major public park since Kezar Pavilion opened 100 years ago in Golden Gate Park and the first to be built by Rec and Park anywhere in the city since the Richmond Recreation Center opened in 2000.

Named after the late San Francisco dentist and Rec and Park commission Dr. Francis Herz, the facility got the bulk of its funding from the 2020 Health and Recovery Bond, with additional funding from Sunnydale Infrastructure LLC. Once the funds were secured, decades of community waiting for a gym were eliminated very fast.

The structure was the last by architect Marsha Maytun, who died in 2024 after a career focusing on affordable housing complexes and cultural destinations including the Bay Area Discovery Museum. An advocate for sustainable design, Maytun incorporated the use of mass timber, a laminated wood product that negates the need for drywall and eliminates several steps in the process.

“The finish is the structure,” said Goodwin, who noted that when she took maternity leave in March 2024, the Rec Center was still rebar and foundation blocks, and when she returned six months later it was standing tall, at 11,500 square feet.

The gym sits between Coffman Pool, a Rec and Park facility, and the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, which also recently opened in the Hub, a community center that is part of a Mercy Housing project, which will eventually supply 1,700 units. The adjacent Herz Playground has also just undergone a $3.3 million renovation.

When the gym opened on January 11, there were eight futsal games involving 176 kids. The gym has been in steady use ever since, seven days a week. “There are things going on all day every day,” Goodwin said.

Herz is within eyesight of that other big gym, the Cow Palace in Daly City, where the San Francisco Warriors got their start. Bringing it full circle, the Junior Warriors, another Rec and Park league that uses uniforms branded by the Golden State Warriors, practices and plays games at Herz. When the youth leagues aren’t using it, the gym is lined for two basketball courts, crosswise, and open to pickup games.

The gym has a separate multipurpose room with yoga classes on Thursdays, and more classes are coming. An Ethiopian music class for kids occupies the space on Fridays. “It’s already a bustling hub for healthy activity and community, and you can feel how much it adds to everyday life,” said Rec and Park interim General Manager Sarah Madland.

“You don’t need a fancy gym membership,” she said. “Everyone is welcome, and it’s easy to connect with friends and neighbors.”

The Sunday flow was all day. Kacy Diouf brought her daughter Lena, 10, over from their Haight-Ashbury home for the futsal league. “It’s beautiful and brand new,” said Diouf, who grew up in the city playing soccer year-round outside on pockmarked dirt fields and started at forward for the varsity team at UC Berkeley, playing in Edwards Stadium. Watching Lena on this polished new surface, she said, “I hope this gym inspires a new generation of city kids to become great athletes.”

Open less than a month, Herz already has a nickname – Renee’s Place – as tribute to Renee Strong, a community advocate who has been campaigning for a gym in Visitacion Valley for more than 20 years. She was there for the dedication earlier this month, and there a few days later when Mayor Daniel Lurie came by to shoot a few baskets with neighborhood kids.

“This was one of the only communities in the city without a gym,” Strong said. “It was just an empty lot where I used to pick up garbage. Now the children and families of Visitacion Valley finally have a safe haven like all the other communities in San Francisco.”