RESEDA : Anti-Gang Softball Program Planned

A gang-intervention program credited with supplanting drug dealers with softball players in Lanark Park will be duplicated in Reseda at the end of this month.

The program, Keep Youth Doing Something, has been bolstered by a $40,000 grant from the federal government obtained last summer through the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation. Half the grant will go toward establishing free Friday-night softball games in Reseda Park, and half to continuing the Lanark program in Canoga Park, said Sandy Kievman, a deputy for City Councilwoman Joy Picus and president of KYDS.

Ramona Fuentes, a single mother of four children in Reseda, said she hurried to sign her 15-year-old son up for a spot on a softball team.

Nowadays on Friday nights, the boy “goes to bed early, sometimes from boredom,” said Fuentes. “I’m worried someday he will get too bored and get bad. . . . I don’t want to get to the point that I don’t know where he is and who he is running around with. This way I can say, ‘Yeah, he’s in Reseda Park.’ ”

Free softball games were started on a limited basis last year in the park at the corner of Reseda and Victory boulevards. But the games “fizzled out” due to problems securing regular coaches and consistent support, said Kievman. This year, a variety of service groups, including the Reseda Chamber of Commerce and Elks Club, have been recruited to back teams, while the federal grant will help provide meals and transportation, she said.

Kievman said the purpose of the grant is to help clean up city parks that have become pockets of drug dealing and violent crime. The co-ed softball teams are recruited among neighborhood children and teen-agers and from social service agencies. At-risk youths are especially targeted.

Four Reseda teams are expected to start practicing in coming weeks, many of them recruited from nearby apartment buildings. Warren Holden, father of five, has done his part, garnering about 25 names from the building he lives in.

The teams will “give them a gathering place, a sense of belonging,” he said.