Growing by Leaps and Bounds, Soccer Puts Strain on Parks
Those who doubted that soccer would catch on in America, consider Exhibit A: Orange County.
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 moms and dads hoisting camcorders, the scene is like a shooting gallery.
“Just being on the sideline,” commented coach Karen Seanoa, “you’re in danger of getting hit by a ball.”
During the week, teams practice after school until the sun sets. Then the accommodations get tighter. Only two fields are lighted.
“When we start losing light, everyone migrates to these two parks,” said Dave Nelson, a coach for two Garden Grove teams. Once standard time returns late this month and darkness comes earlier, the situation will only get worse.
That is the problem for enthusiasts: Soccer’s spectacular growth in Southern California has far outstripped the availability of parks and fields where teams can practice and compete.
From south Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, city park officials face a dilemma with overcrowded, overused fields.
About 145,000 youngsters ages 4 to 18 are playing 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 leagues 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 San Fernando Valley that soccer fields are managed like country club tennis courts, with each hour booked weeks in advance for fees up to $25 per hour. Thousands of youngsters play there from sunup to sundown.
“There’s no question that soccer is the most underserved sport,” said Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission. “We are nowhere near [having] the facilities needed to meet the demand for soccer.”
Communities with the land and money are attempting to keep up with the boom.
Laguna Hills, for instance, is laying out two new soccer fields that will be part of a $22-million sports complex, which also will contain baseball diamonds, a roller hockey rink, a dual-level skateboard area and a community center.
Nearby Mission Viejo has five sports complexes and is building the 11-acre Florence Griffith Joyner Olympiad Park, which will have two soccer fields. The city would seem to be the envy of any municipal parks program.
But with 4,200 children just in its AYSO ranks--the second-largest AYSO region in the nation--the city still doesn’t have enough fields. The crowding requires youth and adult soccer leagues to bend and cooperate.
“We take the younger age players and have them play at neighborhood parks and schools, and as they get older, they go into our five sports parks,” said Kelly Doyle, director of recreation and community services.
It helps that smaller soccer players don’t need as much space, he said.
Urban Areas Face Bigger Space Problem
Communities without money and real estate are in tighter straits. Young soccer players from throughout Glassell Park and Lincoln Heights, near Dodger Stadium, 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.
On a Monday night, a softball game is in progress, but a ball driven to the outfield becomes an immediate hazard because three soccer games are being played there at once. With multicolored uniforms and red cords used as separation lines, the scene resembles a carnival. Lines of relatives cheer on the sidelines.
“Kids are happy with just a little bit of the field,” said Ramiro Hidalgo, one of the coaches. “They don’t care if it’s a regulation-sized field; as long as they can play, they’re happy.”
Yet some soccer coaches complain that an anti-soccer bias limits access to some fields, especially in places where intense soccer rivalries had 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 priority, Vasquez said. “Soccer is not an American sport.”
Interamericana, a league of mainly Latino adults, has grown in a decade to 250 teams and 5,000 participants. However, last November, Costa Mesa pulled the league’s permit to play at 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 near, 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 often those who love the game most must travel farthest to find a place to play.
Pico-Union is a soccer hotbed of families from Central and South America. Located a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles, the community is also a dense environment of hulking apartment buildings, commercial strips and aging homes. To play soccer, kids 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.
World Cup Events Sparked Interest
The explosion of soccer’s popularity does not owe entirely to the region’s communities of immigrants, who bring the game’s heritage with them from their home countries. A sport that was once the butt of jokes has received unprecedented media attention in the U.S.--especially in Los Angeles--because of two World Cup tournaments staged here.
The World Cup, the world’s grandest sporting spectacle, featured men’s matches in Southern California in 1994 and women’s matches earlier 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, the city sports leagues in Los Angeles saw a 35.1% increase in girls signing up--and most of them chose soccer, the city’s 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 both girls and boys, now surpass those for football and baseball at some parks and community centers.
The growing popularity of soccer has its drawbacks. Adult teams, giving way to youth teams during the day and evening, often play into the night, sometimes angering nearby residents with late-night cheers and noise.
Residents in Costa Mesa, for instance, complained about late-night noise generated at Interamericana games. The league, which was playing as late as 11 p.m. on weeknights, began ending games earlier. Vasquez said the decision was easy because players had to get up early for work the next day anyway.
Unable to build new soccer fields, some cities are trying other creative approaches to handling the demand. The city of Orange is one of many 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’s Fred Kelly Stadium for both 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.
The city may run into one problem in wooing school officials for more fields. The city doesn’t allow adult leagues on its fields because of the wear and tear the adults cause. So the teams have gone to the school districts to pick up needed playing space.
In another area of Orange, the city is condemning 15 acres that have long been earmarked for a park and almost were sold earlier this year to a private school. The city plans to construct a sports park that would include five soccer fields.
Leagues Are Using Creative Alternatives
Various deals have been reached in Los Angeles with the city paying local 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 folks support this approach because it allows more youngsters to play.
Faced with a 120-player soccer league with no place to play, Los Angeles Housing Authority officials came up with an innovative plan. They turned 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 now 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.”
Times staff writers David Ferrell and Jeff Gettleman contributed to this report.
