A Common Goal : Santa Ana, Soccer Leagues Kick Off New Era of Communication

For years, thousands of this city’s soccer players have scrambled for suitable fields to play on and groused that Santa Ana leaders have stood in their way. At the same time, city officials have decried street violence and sought ways to keep kids away from gangs.

On Sunday, both camps found common ground for the first time in years. They came together to inaugurate three new city soccer fields in Centennial Park at festivities complete with mariachi music, a ribbon cutting, games on all fields, and plenty of handshaking and speeches by public officials who have had little contact with the Latino community leagues before now. “We consider it monumental,” said Santa Ana attorney Jess Araujo, one of the organizers. “It’s finally happening after all these years. Finally, someone decided to organize them.”

The event drew an estimated 5,000 soccer players from ADELA--the Associacion Deportiva Latinoamericana--and was lauded by councilman and mayoral candidate Miguel A. Pulido Jr. as the beginning of a new era of communication between the city and the grass-roots grid of soccer lovers. The group of leagues boasts about 19,000 players, and organizers estimate that about 15,000 live in Santa Ana.

“It’s wonderful to see all these people so excited about sports,” said Pulido, who cut the ribbon and was followed onto the field by thousands of soccer players and their families.

“It’s the beginning of not only a new day but a new way of working together that is beautiful,” he said.

In addition to Pulido, other Santa Ana council members at the rally were Ted R. Moreno, Robert L. Richardson and Patricia McGuigan.

Organizers hope that Sunday’s rally will be a first step toward easing the bitter and long-standing tensions between the city recreation department and the independent leagues, who complain that in the past they have had to fight for access to Santa Ana’s limited and poorly maintained fields.

“All they want is to say, ‘Let’s be equitable about this. What can we do to get more soccer fields and how can we use the ones we have more equitably,’ ” Araujo said.

The issue, however, is far from resolved. Two weeks ago, the city’s Department of Recreation and Community Services opened the state-of-the art Centennial Park Soccer Facility with its own ribbon cutting as a kickoff to the newly formed city soccer league, the first in Santa Ana’s history.

The city league, said department manager Jon (Rip) Ribble, will get preference on the new fields, which are gated and locked. The new city teams took a day off their tournament Sunday to allow the independent leagues to try out the fields. He stressed, however, that the city league is open to everyone and that the department “never tried to give anybody the cold shoulder.”

“There has been a cry for soccer fields for years, and for years we have promised that as soon as there is funding we would create new fields. But we never promised the fields to any one particular league,” Ribble said. “There’s a lot of other places where leagues are playing. We’re continuing to allow them to play on those fields. It’s just that we reserved these new fields for the new league.”

But ADELA members say they hope Sunday’s rally sends a signal that they plan to keep clamoring for what they believe is their right to play on all the city’s fields.

“Equal access to the parks is all we ask, including to Centennial Park. That’s the reason for this whole battle. We all pay taxes,” said Humberto Lopez, who heads a league of restaurant and hotel workers.

“The Hispanic community is a very large community and somehow it’s not recognized. We’re trying to find out what are our mistakes, so we can be with the system. If no one teaches us the system, how do we know?”

Lopez said the leagues provide a great service to the city’s youth and should get some recognition.

“Discipline is strict. I tell them, ‘Don’t come over here and make a bad scene.’ It keeps adults out of gangs. For kids, it keeps them off drugs, off gangs, off any activity that’s against the law. That’s what the leagues do,” Lopez said.

For years, he said, they have been struggling with Santa Ana park officials to gain access to fields, and complaining about dusty, rutted conditions and lack of lighting there. Sometimes, he said, the city would not unlock bathrooms for them during their games.

“We have to go running around looking for a bathroom, kids and ladies and everyone,” he said.

Ribble counters that neighbors near those fields have complained about the constant activity. They say the players wake them up early in the morning with their music and leave trash on the fields at night. Creating a city league solves the problem, because it grants the city more control over when and where the teams play. The gates at Centennial allow the city to control the amount of use and keep the fields green and sodded, he said.

He also said that many members of the city league, which is hoping to expand from 11 to 80 teams for the next season, in January, came from ADELA teams, and some of them complained that costs on their old teams were high and unpredictable.

“We said, ‘Hey. This is a golden opportunity to run this program the way we wanted it to run.’ The city league will have access to the new fields, we’ll hire people to run the league and have people in the community involved. We’ll also have open space so some of these other people can have opportunities,” Ribble said.

But Lopez, who has run his league since 1984, said many of the leagues enjoy their independence and don’t want to be run by the city. They simply want access to the fields.

The standoff may be coming to an end, Lopez said, but only because people with a little more political know-how have stepped in on his side to help.

Recently, Sergio Velasquez, publisher of a Santa Ana Spanish-language weekly, began looking for allies for the leagues. Among them, he found Araujo, and his law partner Andrew Di Marco, who are helping ADELA to secure nonprofit status. He also found Pulido, who is working to rally community support for the coming election and says he is concerned with recreational opportunities for youth. The councilman helped the group reserve the park for Sunday’s event.

“We’re working so hard to take people off the street,” Velasquez said. “Here is something that is very inexpensive--the cheapest kind of activity they can engage in. We get a field and a soccer ball and they’re out and running.

“If we had to pay people to be captains of leagues and get the kids out and bring out the seniors, we couldn’t pay them enough. And here they’re doing it for free. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Pulido said he wasn’t aware of the years-long history of struggle between the leagues and the city before he met with ADELA leaders a few weeks ago.

“I assumed that (the Centennial Park fields) were open to a lot of people to use them. As it turns out, the plan had been for the new fields to mainly serve the leagues that the city had formed,” Pulido said. “Let’s just say that unfortunately I was not aware of what was occurring relative to access to the fields. I told them let’s work together. We’re talking about some really neat things.

“I’ve made the commitment and the council’s behind it to provide access,” he added.

Among the recent plans, Pulido said, is an offer by ADELA players to volunteer their landscaping expertise to keep up the city’s fields for free. Pulido is currently working with the city attorney’s office to iron out liability glitches and Ribble said his department welcomes the help.

League organizers are pleased to have pried open the door to city government, but they are wary that once the Sunday festivities end, they will once again be shut out.

Backers such as Araujo said they hope that won’t happen.

“It’s in the interest of the fathers of the city to recognize that this group has been promoting healthy values. It’s a healthy sport. It’s a healthy competition,” he said. “They bring a tremendous benefit to the community and it should go both ways. . . . They do want people to know that they are a major force of organized family values.”

The fields drew rave reviews from many of the players who said they are eager to start playing on them.

“I feel good about the whole thing,” said 22-year-old Daniel Diaz. “This will eliminate some of the problems in finding places to play and these are much better fields than we had been playing on.”

Times staff writer Greg Hernandez contributed to this story.