Another Dirt Lot With No Snack Shack

The infield is buried beneath overgrown grass. There are no bleachers, no scoreboard, not even a pitcher’s mound for Danielle Zymkowitz to mount.

So the freckled 10-year-old known as “D Bomb” hops atop an uneven patch of dirt that her father and some other softball dads raked clean a few hours earlier at Hughes Middle School.

Danielle, who takes private pitching lessons every week, winds up and zings a smoking fastball across the plate. Strike one.

A cheer erupts from a cluster of parents who dragged their plastic lawn chairs to the barren sidelines to watch Danielle and the Y2K Crew battle the Ravens in a West Valley Girls Softball League game.

“Two pitches to the glove, Dani, let’s go, baby!,” her coach hollers. “Concentrate!”

Four miles away at the Westhills Baseball complex, used mostly by boys, the fields are emerald green, tended by a paid caretaker. The base lines are coated with the finest in ball field dirt: crushed brick dust. The wooden bleachers even have roofs to shield fans from sun and foul balls.

For three decades, as the West Valley girls bounced from field to unkempt field without a permanent home, Westhills boys played in a ballpark paradise.

Some of their sisters play in Danielle’s softball league, which sued Los Angeles over its scruffy fields, accusing the city of favoring boys over girls when doling out playing turf.

Two years later, not much has changed.

A settlement giving the girls a 15-year claim to their own softball diamonds has crumbled. And last week, a gunman opened fire yards away from the fields at Canoga Park High School where about 45 girls were playing. They dove behind walls and a storage bin as shots rang out.

A few girls say they’ve had trouble sleeping since the shooting. But at a recent game at Hughes, the players appeared to be far more interested in snagging pop flies than dissing their ragged fields--the eighth place the league has used in two years.

“These girls, they’re so resilient,” said Alison Howerton, a West Hills mother whose 11-year-old twins play in the league. “They play in such adverse conditions, but they just let it go right by.”

Behind the backstop, a wriggly row of ponytailed players claps and chants to the batter: “Home run!” Clap, clap. “Court-ney!” Clap, clap.

The cheers escalate to high-pitched shrieks, enough to take chrome off a trailer hitch, as the pitcher winds up.

D Bomb, a lean-limbed athlete whose repertoire includes the curve ball, the changeup, and the rise ball, blots out everything but the catcher’s mitt. She coolly flings another strike.

Sure, Danielle says later, she knows all about the lawsuit. She marvels at the immaculate fields enjoyed by the Westhills boys and craves the same amenities for her team, the Y2K Crew.

“They have a good snack shack, with hot dogs and hamburgers,” Danielle says. “See, we don’t have a snack shack--we just have a table with chairs. Oh, and they’ve got batting cages.”

Concession Stand Key to Success

The “snack shack” may seem a trivial convenience, but in fact a hot dog and hamburger joint is a vital way to fatten a ballpark with cash.

At the Westhills facility on Valley Circle Boulevard, the food stand pulls in about $2,000 every weekend during the spring season, according to board member Jan Hartt. It raised $47,000 last year.

The girls league, by contrast, made $4,068 in all of 1999, hawking candy and soda from card tables.

Some of Danielle’s teammates are only dimly aware of the 30-year-old league’s struggle to win a permanent field. They crowd around a reporter nonetheless, eager to get a word in.

“What lawsuit?” asks one 10-year-old when it’s her turn.

Others, often older girls who are veterans of the long tug-of-war with the city, are discouraged by the lack of progress.

“It’s been going on for so long that people have kind of given up on it,” said Amanda Koenig, 12, who plays first base on the Blue Streak team. “It makes me kind of feel that the city is all for the boys. It’s all about the guys.”

The Westhills league, one of 10 private baseball leagues in the Valley, boasts electronic scoreboards, turf-lined batting cages, bullpens and dugouts. The lush ball field was sculpted on city-owned land through countless volunteer hours by parents and others over the years.

Moms push strollers and little boys ride skateboards along the paved paths that wind between fields. Hungry families crowd around the snack shack and then adjourn to nearby picnic tables to eat.

But at Hughes, the only structures in sight are eight aging backstops. The parking lot is warped and cracked, infested with clumps of sprouting grass.

“It looks kind of trashy,” Amanda sighs.

A sense that somehow the girls have gotten stuck out in left field hovers over their games. With every ugly bounce of the ball, every twisted ankle on an uneven field, girls and parents say, the thought pops up again: It’s not fair.

Last October, the city agreed to a settlement that gave the league $100,000 to renovate four fields at Hughes, which is not currently being used as a middle school. The deal included a five-year permit, with a 10-year renewal option.

But the plan fell apart because the Los Angeles Unified School District, crippled by a severe shortage of schools, refused to sign away rights to land it might soon need. A short-term permit, good only until October, was the best it could do.

The girls’ league plans to spend $10,000 to strip the grass off the infields and make other improvements--a gamble with no guarantee that they’ll be back next year.

“Right now, they are nomads at a temporary stopover,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the girls.

‘Fighting for a Long Time’

For now, some parents say, Hughes is better than what they had before: a few fields at Canoga Park High and Shadow Ranch Park. If they had more than one daughter playing, parents were often forced to choose between watching girls who had games at the same time--on fields two miles apart.

“I do feel like we’re all gypsies running from one field to another,” said Terra Geisler, whose 6-year-old and 10-year-old girls play softball.

In the wake of last week’s shooting, the league quickly packed up at both Canoga Park High and Shadow Ranch and hustled over to Hughes. So what if they only have a six-month permit to play there, parents reasoned--at least they will all be together.

For now. “It’s kind of hard, because West Valley Girls Softball feels like we don’t have a home to go to,” said Taylor Geisler, 10. “We’ve been fighting for a long time and we still don’t have it.”