High-Flying Team Hopes It Can Find Someplace to Land

A young baseball team on the road from Huntington Beach will be coming home to an uncertain future.

The all-star team representing the Ocean View Little League tonight takes on a baseball club from Wyoming in the first of five Western Regional games. The winner of the series, played in San Bernardino, will represent the West in the upcoming Little League World Series Aug. 20-26 in Williamsport, Pa.

Back home, meanwhile, the baseball field where the league’s teams have practiced for 10 years has been leased for construction of a hardware store, raising fears that a potentially world-class team could end up without a place to play.

“The biggest issue we have right now,” said Jeff Forsberg, vice president of the league, “is that we’re on a train . . . and no one really knows” where it’s going.

Officials for the city and Ocean View School District, which owns the field, insist that the league, with 660 players ages 5 to 15, won’t be abandoned. But Forsberg and other league officials say they can’t help but be skeptical. “This has been an ongoing issue,” Forsberg said. “As a group we’ve been putting our heads in the sand and hoping it would go away, but now it looks like that’s not going to happen. It’s going to be a tough road.”

For years, the school district has allowed young athletes free use of the fields at two closed schools. Local soccer teams play at Crest View school on Talbert Avenue just east of Beach Boulevard, while baseball teams practice at Rancho View school near Beach and Warner Avenue.

Five years ago the school board voted to explore leasing the two sites to commercial interests and recently signed two leases: one with retail giant Wal-Mart for a store at the Crest View site; and one with Lowe’s Eagle Home Improvement Center, which plans to begin construction next spring on a facility at Rancho View.

The combined annual income from the leases, each spanning 65 years, is projected at $1 million, district Superintendent James Tarwater said. “By using our land assets,” he said, “we will be able to do school construction and modernization without going to the taxpayers.”

To make sure that young soccer and baseball players are not left without a place to play, city and school district officials plan to build a youth sports complex at the former Park View school site next to Murdy Park, part of which would be reconfigured.

Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services, estimated that the project would cost between $500,000 and $750,000.

“We’re into doing the plans and specs right now,” he said Tuesday. “The city has hired a consultant who has designed the complex and is currently doing final modifications and preparing cost estimates.”

The Ocean View school board is expected to discuss the project Aug. 18, Hagan said, with the Huntington Beach City Council set to do so three days later.

To make sure the Little League and soccer teams are not pushed out, he said, the city has mandated that no work can begin on the Wal-Mart and Lowe’s projects until two athletic fields are available.

“The Little League doesn’t have to worry,” Hagan said. “If the school district can’t put all of this together by the time they want, then they can’t start construction until the relocation is completed.”

But the Little League’s Forsberg says he’ll believe it when he sees it. Though he said he is glad that officials are looking out for the athletes, he doesn’t relish the prospect of space being shared by baseball and soccer. Though the two sports are played in different seasons, he said, sometimes they overlap.

“We’ve never had to share,” Forsberg said. “We’re going from a single facility that we’ve had for years to a multiuse facility where we have to satisfy as many people as possible. I think the groups need to sit down and figure it all out.”

Chuck Beauregard, chairman of Save Our Kids, a group founded to ensure that youth sports activities thrive in Huntington Beach, said of Ocean View Little League: “If I were them, I’d be euphoric.”

Beauregard said that the new sports complex will have improved lighting, more parking and better restroom facilities than the league’s current grounds.

“They win,” he said of the young baseball players. “Other than the fact that this has taken forever, this is a winning situation for the league.”