Macalester College officials have turned down a request from the Minnesota Thunder, the local minor league soccer team, to play 10 of 16 home games at Macalester’s stadium.

In a letter to residential neighbors of Macalester, Vice President for Administration and Treasurer David Wheaton and High Winds Fund Director Tom Welna wrote that hosting the Thunder was not in Macalester’s best academic interests.

“The proposal raised issues of noise, traffic and parking that we felt would be too numerous in the concentrated schedule of games,” the letter said. “When compared to the issues of public safety on Grand Avenue and the on-going, long-term renovations of our academic, residential, athletic and arts facilities, a full schedule of professional soccer seemed more like a luxury than a necessity.”

Macalester officials also worried that the tight scheduling of the Thunder and Macalester athletics would leave Macalester teams with reduced practice times and a worn out field.

For the last six years, the Thunder have played one game per season at the stadium, typically during the summer. Attendance at the Macalester game has doubled since the team began playing at the stadium.

Although Macalester’s administration rejected the Thunder’s proposal to play all 10 home games at Macalester next year, the administration offered to continue to allow the Thunder to play one game in July.

Students in the Veggie Co-op live directly beneath the stands of the stadium, but Veggie Co-op resident Colleen Stockmann ’05 said that the Thunder games would not have been much of a nuisance. “Residents of the co-op know what they’re getting into, there is good sound insulation and residents are likely to be awake anyway during the games,” she said. “Any problems from the games were more likely to be traffic and parking around the co-op.”

The Thunder were founded in 1990 and played their home games at the National Sports Center (NSC) in Blaine, Minn. The team recently announced that it was leaving the NSC, its home for 14 seasons, in order to increase the team’s exposure in the Twin Cities.

“We need to be centrally located in a stadium that captures the atmosphere and passion of the world’s most popular sport,” Thunder player Amos Magee said. “We need to expand our fan base from an incredibly loyal, mostly North-suburban cadre to a trans-metro, family base sprinkled with ethnic and mid-twenty, soccer aficionados.”

According to Thunder president Jim Froslid, surveys over the past three years have indicated that fans would attend more games if the team played in a more central location.

Froslid said that relocating would bring the Thunder closer to the some of the largest ethnic communities in the Twin Cities, and increase accessibility to public transportation.

The Thunder have made it to six of the last eleven league championship games and won the title in 1999. The team was recently named A-League organization of the year.