Softball Teams Move Again After Shooting

The nomadic West Valley Girls Softball League, which sued the city because it doesn’t have permanent playing fields, abandoned its part-time fields Thursday, a day after gunfire sent players diving for cover during a game.

Police, meanwhile, continued to search for the gunman who opened fire Wednesday at the Canoga Park High School field from across the street, wounding two young men. Officials now believe an earlier fight in a nearby alley was unrelated to the attack.

Thursday morning, a handful of fathers upset by the shooting mowed grass and chalked the fields at Hughes Middle School in Woodland Hills, where the league has a six-month permit to play.

The shooting, they said, was the last straw. Two years ago, the league sued the city in federal court, alleging that gender discrimination had forced the girls to shuttle among various shabby fields while boys enjoyed long-term rights to plush ball fields.

“This was the kicker,” said Tom Scalisi, a Woodland Hills father whose 10-year-old daughter Christina plays in the league.

After the shooting, Scalisi took the day off from his job as a contractor to help prepare Hughes for an influx of young ballplayers. “We just want to try to give the girls something decent to play on,” he said.

For Edie Gartland, who was watching her stepdaughter Julia play softball when they heard the sharp pops they thought were firecrackers, the move to Hughes couldn’t come soon enough.

“I think it’ll make these little girls that were there really happy and really relieved,” she said. “I mean, there was one girl who was screaming, ‘I don’t want to die!’ My girls don’t ever want to go back there.”

Julia, 11, agreed. After the shots rang out, one of the wounded men staggered across the softball field, his leg smeared with blood, a friend helping him walk.

“I was really scared,” she said. “When the guys started running across the fields, I thought they had the gun.”

Hughes, now used as an adult school and office space, is in a quiet residential neighborhood. In October, the league agreed to a tentative settlement with the city that promised it a five-year lease at Hughes.

That plan has since hit a snag. The Los Angeles Unified School District, facing a dramatic shortage of seats for a growing student population, has refused to sign off on the deal because it may reopen Hughes in two or three years.

For the moment, the city has granted the league a short-term permit for the softball fields as lawyers continue to negotiate. If a settlement is not reached soon, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union, the league may go back to court.