I spend a lot of evenings and part of every Saturday as a volunteer assistant coach for my 11-year-old’s football team. I absolutely adore getting a chance to work with these kids. The best compliment I’ve gotten in a long time came from a parent who said, “My son says you’re his favorite coach because you yell at him in a fun way.” High praise, indeed, from a fifth-grader.
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We split our time between the practice fields and the stadium at our local high school. The practice fields are, to put it mildly, crap. They are patchy at best, rock hard when dry, swampy when wet and only striped about twice a season.
Until the past few years, the fields always seemed pretty nice. The staff deep-tined them a couple of times a year, reseeded as necessary and used a portable irrigation system when things dried out. That all changed three years ago. Why?
Two words: Field Turf. The school system got all excited and shucked out $800,000 of tax money to install the “Field Turf System” on the high school stadium field. In its defense, Field Turf is a decent surface that’s far better than the old AstroTurf. When topdressed properly with a crumb-rubber material, it stands up well and offers nice traction without causing the turf toe problems the old carpets used to. It paints like a dream and looks very pretty under the Friday night lights.
But, the problem isn’t with the product. The problem is the way these folks sell the stuff. They’re very slick marketers who have learned how to convince school boards that this stuff will pay for itself through increased field rental fees and, of course, virtually no maintenance costs.
I bumped into the grounds director for the high school last week, and he confirmed exactly what I thought: “Once they bought the Field Turf, they basically zero-budgeted us for everything else,” he said. “We have about 15 acres of practice fields, a baseball diamond and the school grounds themselves and almost no money to maintain them. I have to beg just to get fertilizer and seed, and they’ve turned my equipment requests down two years in a row.”
(By the way, it’s certainly not just synthetic turf that’s putting a crimp in sports field management budgets. Because most are taxpayer funded in one way or another, “keeping the grass pretty” is one of the first things that school districts and cities will cut when the budget ax falls. That’s short-sighted and stupid, since it’s almost inevitable that just one lawsuit over an injury caused by underfunded field maintenance will cost hundreds of times more than good maintenance would have.)
Thankfully, some colleges and pro teams have abandoned artificial turf to return to natural grass. Unfortunately, far more high schools, small colleges and parks departments are going the same route as my community because of the allure of Field Turf and similar products. As a result, the art and science of creating a natural surface for kids to play on is rapidly being eroded. That’s a shame. Kids should get grass-stained and muddy playing football, baseball and soccer. Moms might hate having to wash those dirty uniforms, but getting them dirty on a natural green field is one of those small things that make childhood special.