O.C. League Given Red Card in Quest for Fields of Green

The school fields are there. They’re generally empty on Sundays. So why not use them for recreational games, the men of the Huntington Beach Soccer League wonder.

It’s because the players leave the fields a mess, officials with the Ocean View School District contend. The Huntington Beach-based district has banned the soccer league’s men from using fields at its 15 elementary and middle schools.

The adult soccer league says it hires janitors to clean up after games. And its 500 members refuse to back down from their weekly games at the three campuses they regularly use.

League president Felipe Zapata said he has begged the school district to change its policies because he believes promoting sports in the Latino community is to everyone’s benefit.

“I told them I will not run the players out. I told them, ‘You run them out,’” Zapata said. “We are not doing anything wrong. We even pay people to clean up. We really feel we are being treated like second-class citizens.”

Zapata began the league two years ago after noticing that many Huntington Beach residents were playing in other cities. Zapata had already organized 200 children in the Club Pachuca League and he believed an adult league would prove popular.

The league has grown from six to 30 teams despite the lack of legal playing fields.

“Soccer is a great way for young people to get involved in sports,” Zapata said. “They play, they relax. It’s a therapy. It’s much better than drinking or gangs.”

The mayor sympathizes with the players but she has no authority to change the situation.

“I really feel for the situation they are in. They have a growing number of people who want to play soccer and no facilities to do it,” Mayor Debbie Cook said. “It’s all school property so we cannot change the policy, and the city has limited field space.”

But Carol Stocker, chief operations and facilities officer for Ocean View, said the league creates “a nuisance. The real difficulty is that they leave a lot of trash and debris behind. They are abusive of the fields.” If they don’t stop and there are any problems with use of the fields, she said, the district will call police. So far, it has not done so.

The charge against the players would be trespassing, but the Police Department would rather work with the players and the district to solve the problem, Lt. Chuck Thomas said. There have been no neighbor complaints about the players, police said. But district officials said they have received complaints about trash left behind.

“This puts the police in a bad position. They have other priorities and they don’t want to tell [the players] to stop playing when the only law they are breaking is that they don’t have a permit to play there,” said Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services. “You can’t blame the school district because adults bring alcohol, food and noise to neighborhoods. That doesn’t mean there is not a need and it is [not] a positive activity.”

League members deny that their activities cause any problems and say that they hire people to clean up after them.

State laws gives school district the discretion to decide who can use their fields during off-hours, said Roger Wolfertz, deputy general counsel for the California Department of Education. The schools cannot use that discretion in a discriminatory way, said Michael Hersher, deputy counsel for the department.

Among those school systems in Orange County that allow leagues to use their fields are the Huntington Beach City, Santa Ana Unified and Fountain Valley districts.