What changes after the storm can tell you
Watch the sequence, not the village name. If a pond is still there the next morning, you are looking at standing water after rain. If the pond is gone and the ground is still soft on day two or three, why does my yard stay wet for days? is the matching page.
Those two clocks point to different layers. Surface water is what you can still see. Saturated soil is what soaked in and did not leave. Mixing them up is how the wrong first tool gets chosen.
A low area vs. soil that will not dry
A dish in the lawn is a collector. It fills because water has no path out at the surface. Ongoing saturation after that dish is empty is water already in the soil.
We do not claim a soil type for Machesney Park. Compacted spots and slow soak-in happen on individual lots. That is observed on the property. Some neighborhoods sit along the Rock River; that is geography, not a drainage design we can specify from a webpage.
When the surface layer and the soil layer are different jobs
If the problem is still a pond, the first job is getting that water off the top — a path, a grate, or less water arriving from a downspout. If the problem is leftover softness after the surface looks dry, the first job is whether groundwater has an exit.
Roof water that lands in a dish, or in a bed along the house, can keep restarting the clock. Check downspout water pooling even when the rest of the backyard is what you noticed first.
Solutions that match a slow-drying yard
After the storm, the question is whether water is still on top, already in the soil, or still arriving from the roof.
Start with the symptom
North of Loves Park
Machesney Park sits in the same northern corridor as Loves Park, with Roscoe and Rockton farther north.