What it is
The Reach 11 Sports Complex is the city of Phoenix’s tournament facility: 18 regulation soccer fields and four baseball fields in a long strip along Deer Valley Road just west of the Scottsdale line, inside the 1,500-acre Reach 11 Recreation Area that runs along the north bank of the Central Arizona Project canal. The city built it to host events rather than to serve a neighborhood, and it says so: regional, national and international soccer, field hockey and rugby tournaments fill it on cool-season weekends, and the grass fields are closed to daily practice, with a single artificial-turf field available by reservation. A visitor who shows up on a Tuesday finds locked gates and an empty lot; a visitor who shows up on a Saturday in February finds several thousand people.
The complex has the amenities of a tournament venue and no more: a playground, restrooms, drinking fountains, grills, and a set of handsome shade structures of quarried stone on steel posts by the Phoenix architects colab studio. Concessions depend on who is running the event. What it has that the Scottsdale complexes do not is the recreation area around it, 18 miles of flat, groomed trail through a mesquite thicket along the canal, which is the answer to the three hours between a nine o’clock game and a one o’clock game.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
You do not choose to. Reach 11 is on this site because North Scottsdale is the club soccer and lacrosse capital of the Southwest from October to April, and when Reata, Bell94 and the Scottsdale Sports Complex are full, the brackets spill a mile west to here. Our tournament weekend note is written for the families this happens to, and everything in it applies.
The practical version
Thirty minutes from Old Town up the 101 to Cave Creek Road, ten to fifteen from the Airpark hotels. Free parking in a string of lots along the complex; park near your field number. Bring shade, chairs, ice and food. The recreation area trail starts at the edge of the fields and is the walk between games.
When to go
You go when the schedule says. The tournament season runs October to April, with the biggest events in the winter months when teams from cold states fly in, and summer leagues under lights on the cooler nights. For the parent, the useful times are the hour before the first game, when the lots are easy and the fields are empty, and the midday gap, which is for the trail and the shade rather than the bleachers.
How to work the day
- Get the field map the night before. Phoenix numbers its fields in a sequence that has nothing to do with the Scottsdale complexes; the tournament’s own map is the one to trust. Our tournament note has the general method.
- Park by field number. The complex is long and narrow along the canal; the lots are strung along its length and the wrong one is a long haul with a cooler.
- Bring your own shade. The stone shade structures are few; the Arizona sun in February is strong enough to burn a northerner by noon. Pop-up canopies are standard here.
- Walk the canal between games. The recreation area’s trail runs east from the fields through the mesquite bosque, flat and shaded enough for a forty-minute loop; it is a different world fifty yards from the sidelines.
- Eat off site. Concessions vary by tournament; Desert Ridge Marketplace is five minutes east on Deer Valley Road with every chain a team of ten-year-olds will agree on, and the JW Marriott is beyond it.
With the rest of the family
The playground handles younger siblings for a game’s length, the trail handles grandparents, and the Marketplace’s cinema and splash pad handle the evening. The hotels at Desert Ridge, Kierland and the Airpark are all within fifteen minutes.
The neighborhood
Desert Ridge to the east, the Airpark’s hotel row across the Scottsdale line, Cave Creek Road’s strip to the west and the open corridor of the recreation area along the canal; the Arizona Horse Lovers Park, with its lighted arenas, is part of the same strip.
The story
Reach 11 is a canal engineer’s name. When the Central Arizona Project was built across the north Valley in the 1980s, the Bureau of Reclamation divided the aqueduct into numbered reaches, each with a wide construction easement along the bank; Reach 11 was the stretch between Cave Creek Road and Scottsdale Road, and when the canal was finished the strip was surplus public land. Phoenix took on the roughly 1,500 acres and developed them as recreation rather than fencing them as infrastructure: a groomed trail system along the whole seven-mile length, the Arizona Horse Lovers Park with its arenas, and, at the Deer Valley Road end, the bank of fields that became the sports complex. Our recreation area guide tells the corridor’s story.
The complex was built for a specific purpose, and the city has held to it even as the north Valley’s demand for fields has outrun the supply. In 2023 local parents and clubs asked why 18 fields sat empty on weeknights while youth teams practiced on school lots; the city’s answer was that Reach 11 was created to host tournaments, that regular practice would wear the grass out before the weekend, and that one artificial-turf field was available to reserve. The policy stands. The shade structures, commissioned through a call for artists and built by colab studio from 6,000-pound local stones set on posts, were the city’s one gesture toward the spectators, and they are better than the usual aluminum.
The Scottsdale connection
Reach 11 exists on this site because the tournament economy that fills North Scottsdale’s hotels every cool-season weekend does not respect the city line. The same events that book Reata and Bell94 book these fields, the same families sleep at the Airpark hotels, and the recreation area’s trail is used mostly by people who live in Scottsdale and think of it as theirs. The Scottsdale Sports Complex is the nearest Scottsdale venue in spirit; Reach 11 is simply larger and run by a different city.
Getting there
From Old Town, the 101 north and then west to the Cave Creek Road exit, north a half mile to Deer Valley Road, and east to the entrance; about thirty minutes. From the Airpark or Kierland, Deer Valley Road or Pinnacle Peak Road west across Scottsdale Road and Tatum, ten to fifteen minutes. Parking is free. On a tournament morning the Cave Creek Road exit backs up; the Scottsdale Road exit and Deer Valley westbound is the local’s alternative.