 There was a time when soccer was a pick-up game in the streets and in local parks, something casual and just for fun. But in recent years, the game has become highly organized and competitive. Some youngsters compete to get on select teams that travel around the world, and some hope for soccer scholarships to college. Parents pay hundreds, even thousands to support such teams, and their lives pretty much revolve around soccer.
With this kind of importance placed on the game, good and safe soccer fields become a premium for games, and Cupertino has the best and best maintained fields in the valley. This means Cupertino is bearing a lion's share of the soccer burden.
Fields in other parts of the region such as the Almaden Valley—where soccer has taken on the importance of a near religious movement—are filled with potholes and in some cases small gullies of mud, making them dangerous. Almaden residents have been trying for 10 years to develop a sports complex, but one does not yet exist.
All of this makes it understandable that the De Anza Youth Soccer Association wants its teams to play in Cupertino and why the league might fudge a little in reporting the number of residents playing in the league. Cupertino requires that 51 percent of the players be residents.
However, the league didn't just fudge a little. It reported that 75 percent—when the reality is 32 percent—of the players in the league live in Cupertino, which makes it look like the league was simply thumbing its nose at the city's regulation. DYSA's faulty reporting was recently discovered when the parks and recreation department, in an attempt to up the charge for nonresidents playing in Cupertino, asked for addresses for the players.
So serious is organized youth soccer, that when parks and recreation stopped the DYSA from practicing on Cupertino fields, the city moved quickly to deal with the outcry from league parents. The city actually bumped the planning commission meeting out of the council chambers Aug. 9 so the council could convene just to figure out what to do about the league's lack of compliance with city regulations.
When the council hurriedly convened that night, it gave the league a temporary use permit through Dec. 31, asking city staff to research whether youth soccer residency requirements should be modified.
The biggest cause for the low number of residents in the league might be the league's highly competitive select teams that pull players from as far away as Palo Alto and Morgan Hill. Some of those teams may not include Cupertino residents. There are also players who live in border cities such as Sunnyvale and Saratoga who attend Cupertino schools.
It's not wrong for Cupertino to host such teams or to consider reconfiguring the definition of local players to include those border students. Perhaps that's what the city will decide to allow.
What is wrong is for a youth league to demonstrate wanton disregard for the regulations of a city that is providing it with such fine facilities. The league could have been on the up and up with Cupertino parks and recreation and dealt with the problem responsibly, or something akin to maturity and respect for the rules. Isn't that what the youngsters have to do when they play soccer?
In the long run, Cupertino may have to face the fact that by allowing so many nonresidents to play on fields funded with taxpayer money, other cities may just believe they can continue to ignore the problem of insufficient playfields for youth sports.
Sandy Sims is the editor of The Courier. Contact her at 408.200.1055 or ssims@svcn.com.
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