Caught Flat-Footed Without Enough Soccer Fields
Those who doubted that soccer would catch on in America, consider Exhibit A: Southern California.
Check out the grass field at Exposition Park, a space just large enough for a full-size regulation game. At 7 o’clock on a recent evening, more than 200 players are jammed into the area. Men and women, boys and girls, hundreds of feet kicking dappled soccer balls.
Burly forwards chase passes a few feet away from 5-year-old pints who still need their parents to tie their cleat shoes. Groups of teenagers practice next to a women’s squad. Grunts, yells and the thump of footsteps fill the air.
“There are no dividing [lines] here--everyone just takes up a space,” said Maria Coreas, who along with her husband, Jose Rivas, brings their young son to play futbol on the newly created field near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They put up with the crowds because there are no other convenient places where soccer can be played.
That is the problem: Soccer’s spectacular growth in Southern California has far outstripped the availability of parks and fields where teams can practice and compete. Not only is that the case at the Exposition Park field--one of a number of overcrowded, overused facilities in the inner city--but it is also true in communities from the San Fernando Valley to south Orange County, from South-Central Los Angeles to the suburbs of Ventura County.
About 145,000 youngsters, ages 4 to 18, play in leagues run by the American Youth Soccer Organization in five counties--Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. That does not count the many thousands participating in city-run recreational programs and smaller independent leagues that must compete for turf with established American pastimes such as baseball, softball and football.
The crunch is so bad in the Valley that soccer fields are managed like private tennis courts, with each hour booked weeks in advance for fees of up to $25 per hour. Thousands of youngsters play there from sunup to sundown.
“Are there enough fields in the city? Of course not,” said Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission. “There’s no question that soccer is the most underserved sport. . . . We are nowhere near [having] the facilities needed to meet the demand for soccer.”
New Fields Can’t Keep Pace With Demand
Point in any direction and the situation is about the same. On a Saturday afternoon in Garden Grove, no fewer than six soccer games are taking place side by side at Chapman Sports Park. For the mothers and fathers hoisting camcorders, the scene is like a shooting gallery.
“Just being on the sideline,” said coach Karen Seanoa, “you’re in danger of getting hit by a ball.”
Communities with the land and the money are attempting to keep up with the boom. One of the more ambitious projects, proposed for the Hansen Dam Recreation Area in Lake View Terrace, would put 12 to 16 new, privately operated fields in the northern San Fernando Valley.
Pueblo Corp., a Century City financial services firm, would develop the $10-million project and make the fields available to the public for a fee.
However, the last soccer development proposed for Hansen Dam died on the drawing board. The L.A. Galaxy, the area’s professional soccer team, planned a major complex there but backed away from the project.
Details of the Pueblo proposal still must be hashed out during a series of community forums and meetings with city officials.
The city, meanwhile, in a separate project, is applying for a state grant to create four fields near the dam.
Those might help, but even if every planned field is built, they will not meet the area’s demand, said Clarence Palmer of the city Recreation and Parks Department. “Hey, if the Valley all of a sudden got another 20 fields, that still wouldn’t be enough,” he said.
A few newer, affluent communities are laying out new fields as soccer continues its rise in suburbia. Laguna Hills is one. Two soccer fields there will be part of a $22-million sports complex that will include baseball diamonds, a roller hockey rink, a dual-level skateboard area and a community center.
Adjacent Mission Viejo is creating two soccer fields as part of an 11-acre project. But there, too, the new facilities will not be enough to accommodate the demand.
Mission Viejo has 4,200 youngsters on the rosters of its American Youth Soccer Organization teams. The crowding requires youth and adult soccer leagues to bend and cooperate.
Communities without money and real estate are in tighter straits. Young soccer players from the Glassell Park and Lincoln Heights neighborhoods of northeast Los Angeles are forced to make do with one small, triangular tract of green space: the Cypress Park Recreation Center on San Fernando Road. The soccer program there, made up of players ages 5 to 17, has grown in just three years from four teams to 28.
Cleats have badly bruised the grass, and large patches of muck are scattered all over the field. Among the players packing the center every night are “little kickers,” dressed in the replicas of uniforms of well-known soccer teams such as Mexico’s Chivas or England’s Manchester United. They exhibit remarkable footwork as they dribble toward portable goal nets.
On a Monday night, a softball game is in progress, and a ball driven to the outfield becomes an immediate hazard because three soccer games are being played in the park at once. With multicolored uniforms and red cords used as separation lines, the scene resembles a carnival. Lines of relatives cheer on the sidelines.
The conditions are at best exasperating, but they represent something of a success story for Cypress Park, a neighborhood once terrorized by gang members who used the park as a hangout. For a long time parents were afraid to take their children there.
“People were intimidated . . . because they saw all the gang members around,” said Artie Hernandez, head of the park’s sports programs.
It was soccer that started bringing children and families back to the recreation center, Hernandez said. They helped drive away the gang members.
Immigrants Fuel the Boom
Some soccer coaches complain that an anti-soccer bias limits their access to some fields, especially in places where intense soccer rivalries have caused fighting. When it comes to deciding who should get to use an athletic field, the soccer players often lose out, said Edgar Vasquez, founder of Interamericana Soccer in Costa Mesa.
Football and baseball get the priority, he said, adding that “soccer is not an American sport.”
Interamericana, a league mainly of Latino adults, has grown in a decade to 250 teams and 5,000 participants. However, last November the city pulled the league’s permit to play at the Balearic Community Center fields after police broke up several fights.
Vasquez, determined to quell the problem, said the league will no longer tolerate violence. “It’s because a few soccer teams have it in their minds that they need to win,” he said. “But we are ejecting them from our league if they fight.”
Meanwhile, Vasquez struggles to find new places to play and practice. He has obtained permits to use facilities in Santa Ana and Irvine and is working on permits for Garden Grove, San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Niguel.
At times his teams have had to practice as late as 11 p.m. With the end of daylight saving time approaching, he also needs to find more practice fields that have lights or are open to the league during daylight hours.
It is one of the ironies of urban soccer that those who love the game most often must travel farthest to find a place to play.
Pico-Union is a soccer hotbed of families from Central and South America. Located just west of downtown Los Angeles, the community is also a dense environment of hulking apartment buildings, commercial strips and aging homes. To play soccer, children must travel by car or bus to other communities sometimes miles away.
“Believe me, we work really hard for these people and our community, trying to keep kids out of the streets--and there’s no one to help you out,” said Nicolas Orellana, director of a Salvadoran soccer league there.
Eighteen players made up the league when the organization was formed five years ago. Now there are 200. They divide up to find practice space, commuting to three parks far from the community hub. One group--mostly 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds--practices alongside men at the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center on La Brea Avenue. Not only do they drive a long way, they risk injury in possible collisions with charging adults, Orellana said.
“It’s terrible,” he said.
For league games, the same youngsters join the crush of weekend soccer players at the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area in South El Monte. The eight fields in that complex, operated by the Los Angeles County Department of Recreation and Parks, are booked months ahead. Every week the number of young athletes totals about 15,000, said park manager Delia Rosales.
The explosion of soccer’s popularity is not attributable entirely to the region’s immigrants, who bring the game’s heritage from their home countries. A sport that was once the butt of jokes in the United States has received unprecedented media attention--especially in Southern California--because of the two most recent World Cup tournaments staged here in part.
World Cup Contests Raise Sport’s Profile
The World Cup, the world’s grandest sporting spectacle, featured men’s matches in Pasadena in 1994 and women’s matches this year, when a charismatic U.S. team won the championship in a dramatic final game at the Rose Bowl. The appeal of that squad has generated slick ads featuring the likes of Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain.
After the Cup was over, city sports leagues in Los Angeles saw a 35% increase in girls signing up--and most of them chose soccer, Soboroff said.
“Los Angeles should be the center of the world for soccer,” he said. “There is just a phenomenal interest.”
Soccer sign-ups, for girls and boys, now surpass those for football and baseball at some parks and community centers.
Unable to build new soccer fields, some cities are trying other creative approaches to handling the demand. Orange is one of several towns attempting to forge a joint-use agreement with the local school district.
If a deal is reached, the Orange recreation department would gain the use of the open, grassy area near El Modena High School’s Kelly Stadium for soccer and football. City officials were scheduled to begin discussing the idea with residents this week, said Gary Wann, the city’s community services director.
In Los Angeles, various deals have been reached by which the city pays schools for the maintenance of fields.
Elsewhere, some soccer leagues have reduced the number of players to permit play on smaller fields. One variation is “micro-soccer,” which pits teams of five to nine people against each other. As long as some regulation-sized fields remain, many soccer fans support this approach because it allows more youngsters to play.
Faced with a 120-player soccer league with no place to play, city Housing Authority officials came up with an innovative plan. They turned the Estrada Courts gym in Boyle Heights into a soccer site for summer league games.
“At first some of the kids came with cleats on and didn’t know what to expect,” said program coordinator John King. But in the end, he said, “they just loved it.’
A more controversial idea under discussion is to replace some grass fields with a mixture of sand and dirt. Such a surface would be cheaper to maintain and allow the city to divert maintenance resources to create new fields. Some parents, though, don’t much care for that idea.
“Soccer is a physical sport,” said Bob Kent, whose 14-year-old daughter plays on a team in Chatsworth. “I know we need more fields, but you’re going to have kids getting hurt if they take away the grass.”
Joseph Trevino is a Times correspondent and Jeffrey Gettleman is a Times staff writer. Staff writer David Ferrell and correspondent Ana Tipton contributed to this story.
