Soccer Fields at Balboa Sports Center to Reopen in August After 16-Month Renovation

Byron Paxter will go any distance for a good game of soccer. A resident of the Beverly Union neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, he drives almost every Saturday to the Balboa Sports Center in Encino to play his beloved sport, accompanied by his wife and their seven-year-old daughter.

Paxter, 30, has been doing that for 10 years, he says, because the soccer facilities at the Balboa Sports Center are unrivaled in just about all of Los Angeles. Of the 55 soccer fields that the Deparment of Recreation and Parks manages in its 430 parks across the City of Los Angeles, no less than 11 full-size soccer fields and two smaller ones are at the Balboa center.

Some 15 soccer teams regularly play at the center on weekends, according to Paxter—except for the past year.

In April 2012, the Department of Recreation and Parks fenced off the area where the 13 soccer fields are located, roughly opposite Balboa Lake, for an extensive grass reseeding and renovation operation that’s still not finished.

“It’s a big problem,” says Paxter. “Our teams are split—eight or nine teams play in Winnetka and Roscoe and the rest play in a single field.”

The lone field Paxter refers to isn’t a soccer field but a bumpy, undulating plot of land bordered by trees a couple of hundred yards west of the official soccer area. This past Saturday, starting at about 3 p.m., dozens of young, almost exclusively Latino men in shorts, jerseys and soccer shoes flocked to the Balboa Sport Center to play soccer in that single field.

“When are the fields going to be ready?” Guillero Orantes, a Van Nuys resident who cleans restaurants for a living, asks with undisguised exasperation. “The field we play in has too many holes.”

The 13 soccer fields are expected to reopen to the public in August, Rec and Parks spokesperson Andrea Epstein told Encino-Tarzana Patch, explaining the reasons for what many perceive as an inordinate, 16-month delay.

“This is an in-house operation, as opposed to an outside contract,” Epstein said, adding that dealing with the dirt on the field was much harder than the Rec and Parks maintenance staff expected. Installing smart irrigation on the fields was another factor in the delay because “a lot more needed to be done for irrigation” than the staff had anticipated.

Planting fresh grass in the fields became necessary because the fields are heavily used and had become worn out, according to Epstein. “What needs to be recognized is that when you’re hydro-seeding, the seeds have to take root, establish, and grow,” she said. “It’s a big project—it’s not like we have one field to take care of.”

The Department of Recreation and Parks decided to reseed the fields with fresh grass instead of paving them with artificial turf because the latter have much higher maintenance costs, Epstein said, adding that the department is working on artificial-turf soccer field projects in the same area.