Follow Bouncing Ball to Santa Ana

Fathers compete against sons, waiters battle busboys, and teens who dream of professional soccer careers in Mexico play alongside middle-aged men with expanding waistlines and deteriorating skills.

In a city that once pulsed with baseball and football, soccer is now the lifeblood of Santa Ana, providing an instant community for new arrivals from Mexico and a sense of family to men and women who play the game here until their knees give out.

Santa Ana is an epicenter for adult recreational soccer, a focal point for the nation’s surging participation in the “world game.” Almost one in 10 of Santa Ana’s 350,000 residents plays organized soccer, dwarfing participation in similarly sized cities. Officials in places such as Tucson, San Jose and Fresno -- each with demographic profiles resembling Santa Ana’s -- say they marvel at the near-fanatical interest in Santa Ana’s recreational leagues and, equally, at the city’s commitment to serve that passion.

Twenty years ago, Santa Ana supported two leagues and about 3,000 players. Today, more than 25,000 people play in the city’s 17 adult leagues. Some 10,000 play in eight youth leagues.

With 1,200 teams to choose from, soccer fanaticos can get their fill any day, nearly any time. Restaurant employees who work nights and weekends have weekday morning leagues, students play in the evenings or weekends, and those with two jobs and family entanglements play whenever they can. This is a city where many Latino families spend the day at the field, playing, watching, eating, chatting and listening to music.

“Soccer is the perfect fit for this community,” said Baltazar De La Riva, who grew up in the community in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a Santa Ana police officer. “When I was a kid, Little League baseball and Pop Warner football were the sports, but as the demographics have shifted, soccer has taken over.”

And the game has virtually overrun the city’s ability to cope with it.

With no off season, the games seemingly never end. Walk past a city park, schoolyard or the most dimly lighted chunk of turf, and chances are a soccer ball is being booted around.

At the highest levels, the Santa Ana Soccer Assn. is a glorified semi-pro league, a collection of ex-Central American and Mexican pros, junior college stars, high school sensations and college washouts. At the middle and lower divisions, the talent is more scattered, but competition is just as fierce.

This is not a place where soccer moms pull up in SUVs, tromp out to well-groomed fields with lawn chairs and Starbucks, watch a game and leave.

A Soccer Party

On weekends, Centennial Park becomes a virtual soccer festival, jammed from sunup to nearly midnight with teams, fans and food vendors. The crackle of chorizo cooking on a food cart and the sounds of a DJ playing popular Norteno songs blend with the yelps and chants of spectators. Kids waiting to hit the field lean on a sagging fence eating oranges.

As opposed to the everyone-plays-and-it’s-all-for-fun mantra of suburban youth soccer, elite players in the Santa Ana leagues are paid $30 to $80 a game, competition is fierce, fans are charged $4 to cheer on family members and friends, and the leagues are run as for-profit businesses.

Dirty play, fights and undisciplined soccer are commonplace, league presidents operate teams in the same leagues they oversee, assistant coaches officiate games in the same leagues in which they coach. The best players can make several hundred dollars a week playing on three, four and even five teams.

The Santa Ana leagues are followed passionately by hard-core Latino soccer fans and covered extensively in the city’s four major Spanish-language weekly newspapers. The league title games are previewed, covered and then dissected, complete with statistics.

The games, and the culture, often seduce promising high school and junior college players, offering them a chance to test their skills against shrewd ex-pros from tradition-rich soccer countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina. But the price tag, high school coaches say, is that the leagues pull young athletes from their schoolwork and ultimately undermine promising college careers.

The nonstop action takes a more visible toll, as well. With the constant games, city park fields get almost no chance to recover. Sometimes the fields are so raw, players are enveloped in clouds of dirt. A field groomed in January is often reduced to cracked earth and dust by February.

Several of the 23 fields used by the leagues, including school facilities and the city’s showcase stadium field at Centennial Park, are a blend of dirt and rock interrupted by small patches of grass. The bumpy, uneven fields can result in injuries and contribute to sloppy play.

The fields weren’t in much better shape in Giliberto Gonzalez’s day. Now coaching his three sons on the same field and the same team on which he once played, Gonzalez said his love for the game is unending. But at times he wonders why he’s still involved in a soccer league with so many challenges.

When he played the Santa Ana leagues two decades ago, Gonzales said, at least his team had a place to train. By contrast, one of Santa Ana’s elite teams -- Seleccion A -- practices Tuesday nights on a patch of grass at Huntington Beach community park, borrowing light from a nearby softball field.

Adult soccer leagues in Orange County date from the 1960s. As the population changed and the game exploded in popularity in Santa Ana, older residents increasingly complained about noise and cleanup. That’s when the city stepped in, says Jon “Rip” Ribble, executive director of parks, recreation and community services for Santa Ana. In the mid-’90s, working with the presidents of the leagues, the city put together a plan to manage the fields.

“We took something that already existed and just gave it more order,” Ribble said. The city recognized early on that it should leave most of the soccer structure alone. “The leagues liked the idea of being organized by themselves,” said Ribble.

These days, Gerardo Mouet, Santa Ana’s assistant director of parks and recreation, spends most of his time on soccer, keeping tabs on the leagues, making sure the fields are not in ruins and settling disputes between league presidents.

Mouet, a 45-year-old who played soccer as a youth in Tijuana, admits the job is sometimes taxing. Still, he sees soccer as a wise investment for a city so youthful and so heavily Latino.

Santa Ana’s population is proportionally the youngest of any big U.S. city, with 38% of residents under 20 and a median age of 26.5. More than 71% of Santa Anans are Latino, according to the most recent census figures.

“It’s a Latin American community now,” said Ribble. While the soccer culture brings families together, the activity in Santa Ana is focused on the adults. “Their attitude is the adults work very hard all day,” Ribble said, “so it’s the adults who should have time and a place to play. Other communities only emphasize kids; this one emphasizes adults.”

Fresno, San Jose and Tucson, cities of roughly half a million people, also have large Latino populations but are not nearly as alive with soccer as Santa Ana. Fresno doesn’t have an organized men’s outdoor league, Tucson has a private adult league that serves about 2,500 players, and San Jose runs a year-round soccer league for about 700 players.

In Santa Ana, city officials say they are doing their best to deal with problems created by a community whose thirst for soccer seemingly cannot be quenched. Construction will soon begin on a $1-million all-weather youth field at Centennial Park, and eventually all-weather turf is planned for Centennial’s three main fields.

Critics of Santa Ana’s adult soccer leagues say it will take more than upgrading a few fields to fix an environment they say is polluted by greed and glut.

“There’s too many leagues, too many teams, not enough fields and too many players competing on three and four teams,” said Gonzalez, whose Arsenal team is the oldest in the 25-year history of the city’s adult leagues.

Diluting Talent Pool

Jose Vasquez, the only player to graduate from the Santa Ana leagues and make it big in the Mexican professional ranks, said the sheer number of teams has diluted the leagues’ talent.

Some league presidents are viewed as strongmen who make a living from the game and dictate who plays whom and when.

Edgar Vasquez, who runs the Inter-Americana and Continental leagues and is a partner in four soccer stores, said such characterizations are stereotypes. The admission he charges, he said, is just enough to cover field rental of $195 for every two hours of play.

And the game serves a more important role than economics, said Vasquez: “When we stop playing, we have no other mode of entertainment. We worry about what people might be doing when we’re not playing soccer.”

Santa Ana City Councilman Jose Solorio was more direct: “Quite frankly, it’s crime prevention.”

But concern about the profit-making nature of the Santa Ana leagues has bubbled for so long that the city, Mouet says, is planning changes. Those include overhauling the field reservation policy, slowly turning the leagues into nonprofits and reviewing the policy of charging spectators admission.

One custom the city may not be able to change is the decades-old system of pay-for-play. When he was the league’s premier player, Jose Vasquez would sometimes command up to $300 for a tournament game.

“Teams want to win, and they want to make sure they win, so they get the best players money can buy,” Vasquez said. “If they’re going to give it to me, I’ll take it.”

The reward of the Santa Ana leagues, Gonzalez said, is simply the shared passion of a beautiful game handed from generation to generation.

Last month, Gonzalez got the old Arsenal club of 1984 together and took on the current crew that now wears the Arsenal colors. The old men dusted the youngsters, 7-1.

The bigger meaning wasn’t lost on Gonzalez’s 18-year-old son, Steve, who scored his team’s lone goal.

“You could see 20 years flash before your eyes pretty quickly.”