AYSO serving Los Altos since 1968! Region 43 serving Los Altos since 1973!

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Field Availability

Each year we are finding it increasingly more difficult to arrange for local field use. The changing landscape is brought on by more youth sports activities organizing in the area and due to increased pressure from the existing sports to be more year round. Add to this the desire by the city and school district to not want to deal with or get involved, and you can see how tensions arise as there are no defined leaders, processes, or goals. See our links above to get more insight into what we are facing each year.

In Spring 2005, city councilman from Los Altos Hills and Los Altos, along with some LASD Board members came together with the youth sports leaders to form an Ad Hoc fields committee. Brad Lyman was brought in by then Vice-Mayor Breene Kerr of Los Altos Hills as the defacto chair. We came prepared with a briefing to introduce our perspective. But soccer was shut out completely -- AYSO and CYSA -- as Brad decided baseball interests were all that he cared about. So AYSO withdrew their support. While we participated in the first meeting, we quickly withdrew as it was clear that (a) they did not want to air the issues in order to come up with a consensus solution and (b) they had what they wanted in mind before the meetings were ever held.

This problem was partly brought to a head because we could not obtain any field permits for Spring 2005 yet again. Instead, we scratched and fought to obtain Egan gym and held an indoor soccer (Futsal) season while we continued our struggle for fields. The previous Spring (2004), we had an outdoor soccer program with over 500 players and not a single field available or reserved. We played on Cupertino, San Jose, and Saratoga fields over the weekend while scrounging for practice fields in parks during the week.

The problem came to a crushing blow when, without notice, both the city and school district decided to change their plans. The city no longer offered us their fields starting in August as they had for the past 30 years of our existence. And the school district decided to reserve all Fall fields for an as yet ill-defined and conceived "After School Sports Program" which was really a flag football activity for boys in grades 4 through 8 organized by a couple of parents. Needless to say, our National office decided they would interested in bringing a lawsuit against the school district for Title IV issues over the availability of fields to girls in both Fall and Spring. Unfortunately, our board has decided not to endorse and go forward with this action. But it has led the school district to recognize this is a problem, document the legal precedents in a new "fields policy" they have put in place, but not changed any procedures for allocating the fields. To date, the youth boys still have the fields almost exclusively in Spring.