I used to do the same thing on my weekend drives to other youth sports complexes. This is what parents of children who play sports do these days. We drive to the volleyball complex in the old warehouse in St. Charles County, or south St. Louis County, or that other one a few miles away, or that one across the river in Illinois.

We drive to baseball fields in Jefferson County or St. Francois County, or in Alton, or if we鈥檙e one of those travel teams we go to Memphis or Indiana to play on the big complexes with turf fields that can handle a little rain. We spend money on hotels and restaurants, on top of the thousands of dollars we spend on sports fees.

And we drive past open plots of land on our way to youth sports nirvana, and we wonder to ourselves what it would take to put some investors together and build a complex right there. Boy, could we cash in.

So when I read my colleague Bryce Gray鈥檚 story in the Post-Dispatch on Sunday about the latest effort to build a sports complex in St. Louis County, this one in the flood plain along the Meramec River, I was not surprised. But in a region that rarely learns from its last flood plain debacle before it moves to its next one, I thought: Here we go again.

Before I echo my friend Bob Criss, the Washington University professor and flooding expert, about what a horrible, foolish, downright shame it would be to build a sports complex in a flood plain area that has been regularly under water for the past couple of decades, let me agree to a couple of caveats:

鈥� Yes, there is a need for more sports complexes in St. Louis. Baseball, basketball, hockey, volleyball, soccer, track and field. If you build it, we will come.

鈥� Yes, it is possible to get an engineering report on pretty much any development in a flood plain that comes to the conclusion that somehow, the new development will be progress; the new retention pond will hold; by dumping a massive pile of dirt in a plateau, voila, no flood plain.

鈥� And, yes, old zoning laws and flood maps are so out of date that developers can make an argument in front of overwhelmed volunteers who serve in elected positions that if they don鈥檛 let them build what they want to build then they will lose in court.

All of these things are true. So is this: If they build it, it will flood. Oh, the fancy new baseball field atop the plateau might be fine, but the folks across the street and those upstream from the new impediment to the water? History has told us what will happen to them.

The simple lesson of flood policy that drives Criss and others to raise a stink every time one of these proposals to build in flood plains comes up 鈥� usually while seeking tax incentives, too 鈥� is that the water has to go somewhere.

So when you pile a bunch of dirt next to the Mississippi River in north St. Louis on property that has regularly been flooded, you cause that water to go elsewhere. Sure, the flood won鈥檛 be our problem anymore, but it will surely be somebody鈥檚. Ditto when you want to build a hockey arena in Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park, or apartments behind the Howard Bend Levee, if only you can get the pumps to send the floodwater somewhere else, or now, a sports complex on a new big pile of dirt that will force the next Meramec River flood in a different direction, like a foul ball headed toward an unsuspecting windshield. Oops. Didn鈥檛 see that coming.

There is solid movement in Missouri toward more sane flood plain policy. Gov. Mike Parson, for instance, has budgeted for a new office in the Department of Natural Resources, called the Missouri Hydrology Information Center 鈥� to help educate Missourians about the danger of rising floodwater in the age of climate change. (Parson and his staff members won鈥檛 actually use the phrase 鈥渃limate change鈥� but that鈥檚 what they鈥檙e talking about.)

The center will, if it鈥檚 funded, produce better maps to help Missourians understand how the concept of 100- and 500-year floods are outdated, and the new floodwater moves faster and deeper, and the old traditions of flood-fighting and rebuilding just don鈥檛 make sense anymore.

But even with such progress, we still end up with monuments to flood plain stupidity, like the aforementioned pile of dirt in north St. Louis that will never be the marina development that was pitched, or the carved-up parkland in Creve Coeur that was stopped after tons of dirt had been moved, and, I suspect, the big pile of dirt being raised near the Meramec in south St. Louis County that will sit empty but still serve to aggravate somebody鈥檚 flooding, somewhere, the next time it pushes the water past it.

And some parent will drive by it, on the way to a youth sports complex for a ballgame, and daydream about what he would build there, if only he had the money to throw down the drain. For some, a field of dreams. For others, a flooding nightmare.