For Joshua McGuffie, the weekly pickup soccer game at Loma Alta Park was a reprieve from the stresses of recovering from the Eaton fire.
The group of local Altadena dads had played together since 2012, bringing together friends and community members in their 30s to 70s for casual, no-fee games open to players of all skill levels. When a youth soccer league started playing at Charles White Park in 2018, the dads relocated to Loma Alta Park.
And then in January 2025, the Eaton fire burned 14,021 acres in and around Altadena, claiming 19 lives and damaging Loma Alta Park. Los Angeles County rebuilt the park in four months, renovating the playground and two baseball fields with support from the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation’s Dreamfields program.
The weekly pickup games took on even greater importance, bringing Altadenans together to commiserate on the challenges of fighting insurance companies and to forget about the horrors of the fire for an hour or two.
“Sunday was one of the best days of my week, because you’re just around other people who are going through the same thing that you’re going through,” said McGuffie, a community college history professor who grew up in Altadena and lost his childhood home in the fire. “At least two or three or four new people wandered in after the fire, and just were like, ‘Oh my god, awesome – 90 minutes where I just have to think about my aching body instead of State Farm.’”
Graham Fortier, a father of two who moved to Altadena in 2020, said the pickup games, played on the outfield of the Dreamfields, connected him to his community during a time when so many friends and neighbors were displaced.
“I lost my house. My daughter lost her school,” he said. “For a lot of us, it’s the one piece of our old lives that we were able to get back. I tried to go salvaging through my rubble, didn’t find anything, not a thing. So literally everything in your life is gone, except for this one game, and this community that you have.”
And then in December 2025, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies stopped the dads mid-game to inform them that their game was considered “organized” and they could not continue playing without paying fees, said Bryce Nicholson, a fourth-generation Altadenan whose home survived the fire. The deputies also said that only baseball was permitted on the field.
The group was informed they were violating section 17.04.455 of Los Angeles County Code, which states that “an organized group or sponsored gathering of 25 persons or more at local and community parks and 50 persons or more at regional parks” must obtain a permit to use the park or a portion of the park.
However, the group never exceeded 25 players and most weeks only 10 showed up, said Christopher Jones, whose home sustained chemical damage in the Eaton fire and who moved out of Altadena after his son’s school was destroyed in the fire.
“It certainly does feel like private money came in, and now they want to keep it looking good, and so they’re going to do everything they can to leave the park untouched,” Jones added.
Jones said the county informed him that the group would have to pay $192.48 per week to use the field for three hours. The fee consists of a $40-per-hour field-use charge and a $24.16-per-hour staffing cost. For one year, the fee would exceed $10,000.
As the group kept returning to the park to play without paying, sheriff’s deputies kept showing up as well to watch them play, Fortier said. During one day, there were nine sheriff’s vehicles at the park just to watch them play.
“For people who have gone through the anxiety of the fire – there was one day where I just sat down at halftime because I couldn’t deal with watching the sheriff out of one eye and trying to play soccer,” McGuffie said.
Eventually, sheriff’s deputies issued citations to five members of the group on March 15 for violations ranging from not following posted signs that only permitted baseball on the field to damaging public property for wearing cleats. Nicholson, who was spectating that day while recovering from a vasectomy, received multiple citations and said he felt singled out after having previously corresponded with the sheriff’s department about using the field.
Those who were cited have until June 29 to contest the tickets.
“For people who have gone through the anxiety of the fire – there was one day where I just sat down at halftime because I couldn’t deal with watching the sheriff out of one eye and trying to play soccer.” — Joshua McGuffie
In a meeting with Norma E. Garcia-Gonzalez, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation on March 30, Fortier said the department claimed the group was an organized adult soccer league.
Garcia-Gonzalez also claimed that adult sports fees subsidize fees for youth athletic activities across the county, Nicholson said, but the dads believe that paying taxes for county parks should allow them to use the parks.
“What is a public space?” McGuffie said. “I think we asked her if they were going to start charging for the playground at any point.”
Patrick Connor, a father of two who lost his home in the fire, said that during the meeting, Garcia-Gonzalez also claimed that permits were necessary to deter violent crime and suggested the group was scaring away private investors who could help rebuild Altadena.
Jones said that his son was encouraged by the parks and recreation department to wear cleats while playing soccer on the same field before the fire.
In an interview, Garcia-Gonzalez said that adult sports fees at county parks allow the county to provide sports programming for young people for only $25, a policy she said has greatly increased the amount of youth involvement in sports countywide.
Garcia-Gonzalez added that the group declined L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger’s offer to pay the fee for six months. Jones said the group maintains that they are not organized and therefore should not have to pay any fees.
On June 2, L.A. County Department of Parks and Recreation Regional Operations Manager Mika Yamamoto said in a letter to Jones that “At the Loma Alta Park sports fields, the posted signage requires a permit for all organized activities on the sports fields.”
The letter was a response to information Jones had been seeking for two months, he said, adding that it had no official letterhead or signature from anyone at the county.
The parks and recreation department also posted an updated list of events that require a permit in county parks, which include “recreation events, sporting events, picnics and family events.” The update also said “the [d]epartment may post signage with additional rules and regulations for particular areas and parks.”
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Parks Bureau Sgt. David Nisenoff said in an interview that the group violated signs at the park, which state that only baseball is allowed on the field, and that the group refused to play in other parks and gymnasiums offered by the parks and recreation department.
“We again asked them to please leave as they were violating the rules yet again, and they challenged the deputies and said ‘You’re not going to do anything,’ and, in fact, asked the deputies to give them citations because they wanted to go to the media – they’re looking for a platform to tell their story,” Nisenoff said.
Nisenoff added that the group was “destroying” the field by wearing cleats while playing on the baseball outfield.
“Three 10-year-old boys standing and waiting for a ball to get hit to them to grab it and throw it into the dirt is significantly different than a group of 20 grown men sliding, kicking, ripping the grass apart with their cleats,” he said.
Nisenoff said enforcement of the rules was not related to the park’s reopening or the Dreamfields donation, adding that “Just because you didn’t get caught before doesn’t mean that what you were doing wasn’t wrong.”
Nisenoff also said the group was hostile toward sheriff’s deputies, screaming, cursing and challenging them to issue citations, which deputies did not want to do because of the group’s experiences with the Eaton fire.
“The rules are there for a reason, and if we let people break these rules, where does it end? What stops somebody from coming in and dismantling the jungle gym and taking it home for their own use?” he said. “We have done everything we can to prevent giving them citations because we are sympathetic.”
Keith Fulthorp, a professor of recreation and leisure studies at California State University Long Beach and a scholar of municipal recreation and parks, said that as soccer becomes more popular, especially due to the FIFA World Cup, the demand for field space is greater than the availability in L.A. County. He added that permit fees help offset budget shortfalls and protect the county from liability.
“It would be nice if their tax dollars covered it, but unfortunately, it’s not how county taxes work for local parks – for most city and county park agencies, they get a small percentage of property tax dollars to fund their programs and services. Most of that goes to police and fire departments, and a small percentage goes to Parks and Recreation,” he said.
Interacting with parks and recreation department staff in Santa Clarita and other parts of L.A. County has led McGuffie to advocate for starting a local Altadena parks advisory board – a group of Altadena residents that would advise Barger’s office on parks programming as they continue rebuilding other local parks, including Charles White Park.
The dads have been able to play infrequently at other locations while fighting to return to Loma Alta Park. Whenever one of them takes their kids to play at the renovated Loma Alta Park playground, they will send each other a photo of the empty baseball field on a beautiful day where no one is playing, Jones said.
McGuffie said he hopes to return the parks to “function like public spaces where people can heal and put together their lives after all this loss.”
“You got displaced by the fire, and then got displaced by the parks department,” he said.