You're 13 years old. You love to play baseball. Every day, you and your friends try to get a pickup game going, or at least play catch.

But there's no field in town. So you play in your backyard. But it's a bit small, and lacks the magic of an honest-to-goodness diamond.

You try playing out in an empty field, but the neighbors keep kicking you off. You find another lot until the owners of nearby businesses call the police, who ask you not to play there.

This happens day after day, so finally you decide you'd rather go to fields in neighboring cities to play. But you don't have a driver's license yet, and both of your parents work during the day.

Sound frustrating? It's what many skateboarders in Los Gatos deal with on a regular basis.

Without a skateboard park, they're left to skate in parking lots, on school grounds, on homemade ramps or at parks in other cities.

But soon, after more than four years of discussion about how and where it should be completed, Los Gatos may have its own skate park.

Town officials first began seriously considering the installation of a park when the parks commission created an ad hoc subcommittee in February 2000. That was partially due to the urging of Mayor Steve Glickman, who at the time was serving on the school board of the Los Gatos Union School District. Glickman says he initially became interested in the cause because his son was a "very dedicated" skateboarder. Though he built a half-pipe ramp in his backyard so his son would have a place to skate, that was no help to his students at Fisher Middle School, who also complained about the lack of such a facility.

"We have a lot [of facilities] for organized sports," Glickman says. "What we didn't have was something for the kids who practice individual sports. There are places we don't want them to go, and they come to us and say, 'You don't want us to go here. Please help us get a place to go.' "

And it's true. The skateboarders are bumped from place to place, asked by business owners, police officers or others to find somewhere else to skate.

So to give them a place to go, the skate park committee began looking at what it would take to get a skate park in Los Gatos. When Glickman was elected to the town council later in 2000, he made the skate park a high priority, saying the town's children deserved the park as a sign of appreciation.

After some research, it was discovered that many people thought the park was a good idea. The town even earmarked $125,000 for initial and ongoing costs of the project.

But the hardest part of the process? Finding a site that pleases everyone involved.

To date, the town council has considered more than 20 possible locations for the facility. For one reason or another (often neighbors' concerns about noise, traffic, and so forth), none have panned out—until now.

"I think that was the best idea," Donovan Dresti says of the site on Miles Avenue that looks promising as the future home of Los Gatos' first skate park. Dresti, a 28-year-old professional skater who has lived in Los Gatos since he was 11, says the parking lot next to Balzer Field, Highway 17 and the Los Gatos Creek Trail has a number of attractive attributes.

"It's close to a freeway," he says. "Realistically, skateboards are a little on the noisy side. But with all the noise from the freeway and the baseball field, it would cross-cancel itself."

The skaters themselves like the site, too. At a recent design workshop to receive input from local skateboarders, the teens who attended seemed enthusiastic about the location. In fact, toward the end, they turned the site into an impromptu park, jumping over a trash can, traffic cone and chairs.

But almost all say they are concerned about a few variables, one of which is what material will be used to construct the facility. They are basically unanimous in their desire for a concrete park as opposed to modular equipment.

"Good ramps, room to get speed," says 13-year-old Kevin Peth of his vision for the park. "Concrete would be a little better. It's smoother, and you can get good speed. Basically, not like Campbell."

Campbell's facility takes a lot of heat from local teens who skate. Those who run that park told the town council in June that it is popular and well used, but Los Gatos skateboarders say they only skate there because it is close. They say the aboveground, modular ramps are not as fun to skate, and the check-in and supervision procedures at Campbell make them feel like Big Brother is watching.

Ryan Honda, a Los Gatos teen who got his first skateboard at the ripe old age of 3, says he is worried the town won't listen to skateboarders' advice about how to construct and run the park.

"If they do it well, it'll be great," Ryan says while sitting on a curb next to NC Board Shop, one of the public places skaters are less likely to be asked to leave. "But the chances of that are pretty slim. If they're gonna do it, they better do it right. I can just see them messing this up horribly."

A few days later at the design workshop, though, Ryan sculpts his design for a "vert wall"—a steep ramp that is completely vertical at the top. And if the council members' remarks at the June 21 meeting at which they approved the Miles Avenue site are any indication, they are willing to listen to Ryan and his peers.

The council had previously directed town staff to look into modular ramps similar to Campbell's, but it heard enough testimony about concrete that night that council members said they were open to either type.

"I think it's very clear that concrete would be the better choice," Glickman says. "Of course I would like to have the best park—we always want the best for our kids ... It will basically be a function of cost."

The $125,000 committed to the project will cover initial studies, some ongoing maintenance and possible supervision costs and some of the construction costs. Based on an estimate from Indigo Architects for a park at a previously considered site, the town would be able to fund about half of the park. The rest will have to come from community donations. And if the council approves a concrete park, the amount to be raised will be even greater.

Parents say they will help chip in, though, because they want a safe place for their teens to skate. Some even agree with their children that a proposed stipulation that the park will have supervision to enforce pad requirements seems a bit overprotective. Kevin Peth's mother, JoAnne Peth, says the perception of skating is a bit different from that of other sports, perhaps making some people more apprehensive than they need to be.

"If the kids said, 'We want to go play hardball at the schools,' we'd say, 'Here's the bat and the balls,' " Peth says. "Maybe people just don't understand."

Though many said they will skate at the park whether it is supervised or not, 13-year-old Jonny Holst echoes many of his peers with his desire for an unsupervised park.

"They should just make it and go away," he says.

His brother, 16-year-old Matt Holst, agrees.

"I like to skate how I like to skate, and I don't want anybody to tell me how."

The boys' mother, Esther Holst, says Los Gatos is understandably apprehensive because it has never had a park before, but that by examining other neighboring parks' policies, it could save itself some time by skipping the trial-and-error process they have already been through. Sunnyvale's park, for example, has no supervision and thus no pad requirements enforced and has been very successful. And according to Town Attorney Orry Korb, Los Gatos can cover itself legally by simply posting a sign with safety requirements.

Indigo architect Bruce Playle says he has seen plenty of successful parks with different operating policies and constructed of different materials. Playle has designed parks as far away as Hong Kong and as close as Concord and Marin. Whatever the skateboarders and the town council choose for the park, he says the town will be left with something special—a totally unique piece of functional art.

"The town of Los Gatos will end up with its largest dynamic art piece," he says. "This is one of the purest examples of the design process, when you take ideas crafted in kids' heads and make them real."

Those ideas will be used to come up with several park designs, which will be presented to the council on Aug. 16. If one of the designs is preliminarily approved, Indigo will hold another workshop to further refine the skate park's features two days later.

Though the park is months away from being a reality, that is the closest it has come in some time. But until that happens, skaters in Los Gatos will keep getting shuffled around the town.

"This is what the janitors do," says 14-year-old Clark Cushman while skating with friends at Los Gatos High School. A school custodian is backing a service truck into the area at the bottom of the stairs Clark and his buddies were hopping moments ago.

"They park in front of the stairs," he says before letting out a little laugh. "Then we just do other stairs."