More than 30 youth sports leagues in Santa Maria Valley provide kids with ample athletic opportunities, but rundown fields, overpopulated facilities, and a general lack of communication have become major issues for local coaches.
“I think probably it’s the No. 1 thing I hear from the people I represent, is the need for access to better facilities, access to more soccer fields,” Santa Barbara County 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino said at a Santa Maria Youth Sports Committee meeting on April 9. It was the committee’s first ever meeting.
“So we’ve got to figure out a way, with shrinking budgets at all levels of government, how we can come up with a strategy that works for everybody,” Lavagnino said to the various league representatives who make up the committee, a by-product of the Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Safety.
An upcoming $3 billion park bond measure geared toward disadvantaged communities could be Santa Maria’s financial solution, Lavagnino said at the meeting. It would be voted on statewide in November, but he said the application needs to illustrate community-wide support and cooperation. The Youth Sports Committee, Lavagnino said, is already a step in the right direction.
“I mean, it has our names written all over it,” Lavagnino said.
Representatives from nearly every sport available in the area were invited to attend the April 9 meeting, where coaches and volunteers discussed the difficulties they often face while recruiting students, scheduling games, and finding practice space.
Roberto Rodriguez of the Santa Maria Valley Boys and Girls Clubs said the city needs to find a way to make sports more accessible to children of low-income families. Those are the kids who really need sports as a violence prevention method, Rodriguez said, but most youth sports leagues cost more than $100 a month to join.
“There are a lot of opportunities for kids,” Rodriguez said, “but a lot of those opportunities are expensive.”
League sports are expensive because of costs associated with renting facilities and fields, costs that could and should be lowered, according to Bob Nelson, chief of staff for 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam. One football league pays nearly $10,000 a year to rent the Santa Maria High School stadium for games, Nelson said at the meeting.
Public school facilities are already paid for by taxpayers, Nelson said.
But local leagues have had many difficulties working with Santa Maria Valley school districts, and Nelson said having a single entity to represent all the sports leagues in the area could greatly improve that relationship.
“One of the other things school districts have talked to us about, is so many people don’t know when sports happen,” Nelson said at the meeting as he handed out a survey for each coach to fill out.
The survey, Nelson said, will help committee leaders compile much needed data on athletics in Santa Maria. From there, Nelson said the committee will be able to create a citywide sports calendar outlining registration, practice, and game schedules for each and every league in the area. That could help leagues stay organized and recruit athletes, which Santa Maria Girls Softball League President Esmeralda Mendoza said isn’t always easy.
Mendoza said the league spent $3,600 to print thousands of flyers in English and Spanish for students last season. The league, she said, gave the flyers to the Santa Maria-Bonita School District for distribution 45 days in advance, and they still didn’t make it out. A district representative could not confirm that incident, but another coach, Travis Gomez of Orcutt National Little League, said he experienced the same issue with other school districts in the past.
The Youth Sports Committee, Mendoza said, could help solve some of these common issues purely through teamwork. The burden of keeping kids off the streets shouldn’t lie on volunteer coaches alone, she said.
“It’s draining for the coaches,” Mendoza told the Sun. “It’s hard enough to have so many kids but to then have them be responsible for everything else is ridiculous. So if there was one centralized entity for all of us, that would be great.”
Staff Writer Kasey Bubnash can be reached at kbubnash@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2018.