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Toddler soccer players kicked out of local parkette due to neighbours' complaints

Three-year-old Greyson and four-year-old Asha play tag before Greyson trips and falls down. They're playing the way kids do, completely oblivious to the controversy surrounding their soccer program.

Now the toddlers have been kicked out of a parkette near Kingston Road and Victoria Park in the Beach neighbourhood, the city says, due to resident complaints.

"How out of control could they be?" asks Greyson's mother, Meagan Ryder. "There's not even whistles. There's six or eight pylons that make a square. They're learning to kick a ball."

Sportball, the company that operates the program, says it had a permit to offer programs to kids 16 months to 5 years old in the Lynndale parkette. That permit was revoked two weeks ago because residents complained the kids were too loud, and the program encroached on their private space.

Nobody from Sportball was available for an interview with CBC News, but a spokesperson told us that "residents felt it was a noisy and unsafe environment ... and invasion of their private space."

CBC News spoke to one neighbour who said the fence lines around the parkette are very low, so residents in the neighbourhood don't have a lot of privacy, and that it was actually the coach who was much louder than the kids.

City spokesperson Matt Cutler says it wasn't the kids that were the problem: "There isn't any road access to this park so families neighbours were finding that they were parking right in front of their homes and [dealing with] congestion."

The city says this was the first year it has ever issued permits for public activities in Lynndale Parkette and described it as an effort to try out a new permit that proved unworkable once implemented.

The program has now been relocated to the nearby Blantyre Public School.

Ryder says she didn't mind moving her child, but thinks the city could have handled the whole thing better. "In total we use the park for this program for six hours in a week, so it just seems like a very dramatic reaction to something super minor."