Guiding Principles
- A Political Project Field of Dreamers is a political project. As a community-based queer and anti-authoritarian space of gathering, our league seeks to re-imagine spaces of play within, against, and beyond the norms and everyday experiences of recreational sports.
- Joyful Militancy – Dreamers believe in the power of joyful militancy and create this space out of a desire to connect people in our community who are engaged in transformative projects, including (but not exhaustive of) activists and community organizers, artists, educators, musicians, and many others.
- Beyond the Binaries – Dreamers seek to create an athletic space that refuses the gender binary, that resists the disciplining of what bodies are and are not wanted in sport, and work to prioritize meaningful opportunities for trans, non-binary, gender fluid, queer, Black, Indigenous, POC, (dis)abled, neurodivergent, fat/mid-sized, women/femmes, and other bodies who don’t always feel welcome on the ball field.
- Baseball Life Lessons – Dreamers draw on teachings from baseball, where failure is such a deeply ingrained part of the sport. In doing so, we work to fail better, to touch base when we see or experience harm, to let people come out of left field, and to work the count by being patient and accountable to one another.
- Personal Growth + Mutual Aid – Dreamers come together to share and develop skills. To offer space for everyone to learn and grow in the game of softball at their own pace in a supportive and affirming environment. Our rules and gameplay are designed to facilitate learning and skill building, but to also accepts and creates space for a multitude of skills, abilities, talents, and body types to play in the league in meaningful and competitive ways. We track statistics as a way to affirm longevity, development, and the joy of seeing your play transform from year to year.
- Community Commitments – Dreamers are committed to developing relationships with other park users, to connecting struggles we are involved in to others in the league, to imagining collectively the worlds we wish to see and working on and off the field to make these things happen. As a project of radical care, we see the important need for social spaces where folks involved in political organizing work can meet new people, can mobilize and politicize each other, can inspire each other to dream together of worlds we didn’t imagine were possible.
- Space/Place – Dreamers understand that national sporting cultures amplify settler identities because they are loaded with cultural significance, but also because spaces of play are a means for settlers to appropriate Indigenous territory. As Dreamers we seek instead to enact relationships of mutuality, respect, and reciprocity with the land and the rivers that guide interactions between all human and non-human beings on these territories. We thank and honour the peoples of the Three Fires Anishinaabek Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Wendat Nation for their longstanding, and continued tending to relationships with this land. We are situated near the Great Lake Ontario at the confluence of the Credit, the Humber, the Don, and the Rouge Rivers and our field sits atop Garrison Creek. These are the five houses of our league and these are the names of our teams. These names remind us of our responsibilities to these territories and to the land on which we play – we have these responsibilities as a league on and off the field. While we are sorted in different house, we are connected together through the goals, aspirations, and principles that guide our league and relationship to this land and our communities.