More Than Kicks

Genaro Cortez didn’t set out to build a soccer league. The 41-year-old carpenter just wanted to kick a ball around with his six sons in Lanark Park, once a notorious hangout for drug dealers.

But there among cruising cars and blaring stereos, the first Cortez family games drew more than casual interest. Kids started asking to play. Lots of them.

Three months later, Cortez found himself in charge of a soccer league with more than 300 players and 21 teams. Though national youth soccer leagues attract sponsors like Nike, Cortez pleads for donations from local burrito trucks and carnicerias.

His recently formed makeshift league is more than just a testament to the growing popularity of the sport. It is part of a grass-roots movement being felt at soccer’s top ranks, springing from some of its most passionate and, some argue, neglected fans: working-class Latinos.

“If you are a Latino person, you’ve got soccer in your blood,” said Rene Miramontes of the U.S. Soccer Federation.

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Cortez’s league and others are emerging because mainstream soccer organizations and public facilities are “geared toward the privileged,” said Bart Brown of the L.A. Soccer ’94 Foundation, which was created by World Cup organizers to better integrate the sport. “There is a separate and unequal system in place.”

As a result, Brown’s group and others are making first-time efforts to promote talent among Latino players in disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. There are also increasing efforts to use soccer to steer inner-city kids out of trouble.

At Lanark Park and other city facilities, parents are not waiting for help. They have been creating shoestring soccer leagues for youngsters who cannot afford to join more established organizations. These rookie organizers are finding they must compete with more established sports, such as softball and youth football, for space at city parks.

Cortez, who played soccer in his hometown of Guadalajara, funds his International Soccer League largely from his own pocket. He buys cheap jerseys in Tijuana, and his players sometimes show up in tattered tennis shoes instead of cleats.

He says the league unites two passions--soccer and helping children.

“Here you have an opportunity with those who are coming up, with children,” he said in Spanish.

At a recent evening practice, he was standing in blistering heat. All around him, small boys romped with soccer balls. He pointed to one knot of boys running by. They could “be a bunch of drug addicts someday” unless someone steps in, he said.

Cortez spends nearly every night at the park. He is joined by neighborhood parents so devoted that some come straight from jobs in local factories, coaching in blue company-issue coveralls.

Nearly all the families involved are Latino. Most live in apartments near the park. “We want them to think about sports, not drugs,” said coach Gustavo Ful, speaking a mixture of English and Spanish.

Besides being a diversion, soccer is a cultural link between foreign-born parents and their children. Many families are from countries where soccer is a national obsession. Fathers describe their younger glory days playing in Mexico, Peru and El Salvador. They loved the sport, they say, and they want their sons to follow suit.

For first-generation Americans, soccer provides “a way to participate in American culture that doesn’t take children farther from their parents,” said Mike Woitalla, senior editor of Soccer America, a Bay Area weekly.

It is also a cheap way to keep kids off the streets, said Jose Garcia, a hardwood floor contractor who runs the United Nations Soccer League at Valley Plaza Park in North Hollywood. The league has grown to 2,000 kids in two years. “One ball is good for 20 kids,” he said.

One of the city’s oldest independent groups is the California Soccer League, based in East Los Angeles for 38 years. It is a low-cost youth program serving about 4,000 kids, “99% Latino,” said President Reyes Oliveras.

These independent leagues are a world apart from the more established American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), which began its season this weekend, and the California Youth Soccer Assn.-South, a branch of the U.S. Youth Soccer Assn. (USYSA).

The two groups are to soccer what Little League is to baseball, and together claim more than 3 million soccer players nationwide. The players are “predominantly urban/suburban white upper-class,” said Ric Fonseca, a CYSA soccer coach and co-founder of the Latin American Coaches Assn., a group formed recently also to promote integration of the sport.

Fonseca is starting a new league in the Pico corridor area of West Los Angeles that represents one of the CYSA’s first efforts to reach out to disadvantaged Latinos.

Neither the AYSO nor the SYSA keeps statistics on minority participation, but USYSA spokeswoman Kit Simeone acknowledged that many children can’t afford to join.

AYSO officials said that although many Latinos play in their leagues in California, the ethnic split in soccer “is generally accepted and acknowledged, though it’s nothing anyone is proud of,” said one official with the group, who asked not to be identified.

Both groups have made efforts in recent years to include disadvantaged children.

AYSO, for example, has three affiliates for low-income children in Watts, Inglewood and near downtown. CYSA-South has sponsored a league in El Centro, in Imperial County.

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But mostly, the organizations reach few needy youngsters.

For example, the West Valley Soccer League, a CYSA affiliate near Lanark, costs $95. That fee covers each player’s own costs, and little is left over. The league sponsors about five to 10 scholarships a year among its 1,000 players, said Martin S. Kanter, a member of the league’s board of directors.

The Lanark parents said those steep fees are the main reason they hadn’t signed their children.

Seeking a sports program she could afford, “I found there wasn’t anything anywhere,” said one Lanark parent, Irma Gonzales. One league she called cost $200, she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I don’t have money for that.”

There is no CYSA-South or AYSO league in Lanark Park. An AYSO group at nearby Winnetka Park costs $80 per season. AYSO costs vary, but $50 to $100 is typical, and some elite CYSA-South leagues cost thousands.

Cortez, by contrast, charges $35 to those who can afford it--well short of the cost of field rentals and uniforms, he said.

Increasingly, amateur and professional soccer groups are seeking to bridge ethnic and economic gaps in the sport.

Elsewhere, “soccer is the people’s game . . . but here it’s geared mainly to middle- and upper-middle-class people, said Octavio Zambrano, assistant coach of the L.A. Galaxy, the city’s professional soccer team.

The issue is pressing because it’s become clear that Latinos are the core of the fan base for professional soccer, he said. “Those people are seeing soccer take hold in this country, but they are not seeing many of their own reach this level.”

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Help for youth leagues such as Cortez’s has been slow to come, though.

Often the new outreach efforts are focused on demonstration teams, clinics and tournaments aimed at showcasing Latino talent for college and professional recruiters, said Miramontes, who was recently hired by the U.S. Soccer Federation to increase Latino representation in the sport.

These could help Latinos advance economically, he said. “I’m an example. I grew up in the barrio in San Diego, and went to college on a soccer scholarship. I would have been happy to stay in my own little world and speak Spanish all my life. But soccer was my vehicle out.”

But some volunteer organizers say they are more concerned with simply keeping their leagues afloat so neighborhood kids have a chance to play.

One big problem is field space.

“I could get donations of uniforms for all the poor kids around here if I wanted. But I can’t sign up more because of lack of fields,” said Father Dennis O’Neil, who runs an AYSO league for low-income kids in the Latino neighborhood west of downtown L.A.

At Lanark Park, Cortez is frustrated that he can’t get more fields because of competition with adult leagues that can afford higher fees. Park officials have not committed to renewing his $1,260 lease when it expires in January.

It looms as a problem, he said, because his soccer league is growing fast. Every time the teams practice, more boys ask to join.

Sad Eric Rose, district director for City Councilwoman Laura Chick: “It’s a balancing act, to provide room for soccer and other activities.”

All over the city, parks are scrambling to keep up with an exploding demand for soccer fields, said Ann Kerman, director of resource development for the city Department of Recreation and Parks. The main problem is that L.A.’s parks simply weren’t designed with soccer in mind, she said.

Meanwhile, Cortez is indignant that his league may be ousted by flag football in January. Soccer is what neighborhood kids want to play, not football, he says.

Zambrano of the L.A. Galaxy agreed. Whoever is in charge of recreational sports “needs to wake up to the fact that there is a new generation of Americans that loves this game,” he said.