School's switch to fake turf may become trend

Ushering in what may be the wave of the future for artificial turf on sports fields in the Las Vegas area, Valley High School recently completed the installation of FieldTurf on its football field earlier this month.

Crews from Las Vegas Paving and FieldTurf, the Canadian-based company that manufactures the artificial surface, completed the project within their schedule and will have the new field ready to go when school returns to session later this month.

"We were within our schedule and we're ready to open up the field," said Ryan Mendenhall, Las Vegas Paving project manager. "From start to finish it took 45 days. It went really smooth."

The decision to go with FieldTurf was logical, whereas the decision to install it at Valley High School was purely logistical, according to Steve DiGiaimo, senior project manager for Modernization Services for the Clark County School District.

"A committee was formed with four individuals from the district to pre-review products. There's a whole load of products out there, ranging from people working out of their garages to larger companies," DiGiaimo said. "We wanted to be very careful in our selection of a product. We wanted a long-term company, a company who had done some major fields and one that was able to supply us with what's called third-party insurance, where in even in the event that they went bankrupt, we would still be covered.

"We (CCSD) had a whole load of criteria that we used to select the company that was going to build the field. Valley High School was selected pretty much because of its central location."

The idea to make the move from real grass to fake grass for some of the school's sports fields started a couple of years ago at the Clark County School District's Department of Planning & Engineering.

"The thought of changing some of the fields actually started a couple years ago when two individuals here started exploring the possibility of switching a couple of our fields to artificial turf," DiGiaimo said.

FieldTurf, the Montreal-based company that makes this new-and-improved version of AstroTurf, has taken the sports world by storm in the last decade. More than half of NFL teams (17) now have practice fields made of the product, while seven actually use the surface for their game fields.

In a poll taken last year by the NFL Players Association, the Seattle Seahawks' FieldTurf field was voted the third-best playing surface in the league, placing it ahead of most of the natural grass surfaces.

Seventeen colleges also use FieldTurf on their football fields, with 12 using the surface for their practice fields. The University of Washington has FieldTurf on both its practice and game fields. Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Devil Rays also sport FieldTurf in their stadium.

Over at Sam Boyd Stadium, UNLV installed a similar product called TurfTech last year in time for the 2003 football season. In 1985, Sam Boyd became the first stadium in the world to put in Monsanto Corp. outdoor retractable turf which could simply be rolled up into cylinders in less than an hour. Before that, the Runnin' Rebels played on traditional AstroTurf, the product that most sports fans are familiar with.

FieldTurf, which has plans to hit Wall Street with an initial public offering within the next year, has now installed nearly 1,000 fields around the world to date. And with Valley High School being the first school in the city to switch to the surface, expect other coaches and players who play on it to fall in love with it.

"As soon as other schools see this, everyone is going to want one," DiGiaimo said. "The surface has a very natural feeling."

Players and coaches who have played on FieldTurf like the softer feel of the product, as well as the way the ball bounces on the artificial surface. A recent medical study by the company also revealed that concussions dropped 30 percent on FieldTurf when compared to natural grass.

The difference between FieldTurf and other modern artificial turfs can be found in its composition, which, according to the company's Web site, is a special mixture of sand and bits of rubber made from recycled Nike sneakers.

"The biggest difference we found between manufacturers is that many of them only use a rubber infield mix which makes it very lightweight," DiGiaimo said. "You can actually grab it like carpet and lift it up. The one thing that impressed us about FieldTurf was that the sand-rubber mix gives it so much weight that it can't be lifted up."

Besides being softer and greener than the average artificial turf, FieldTurf also has some advantages in terms of maintenance, wear-and-tear and water conservation. And with water use remaining a hot topic in the area, this type of surface may become the rule and not the exception.

"You're going to see now with these water restrictions a lot of agencies turning to this option," Mendenhall said. "It's proven to be safer for the players and safe for the environment. It's just a matter of their initial cost catching up with their potential savings on water and maintenance."

Although it appears costly at first glance -- DiGiaimo said the field, along with new goalposts, cost $696,000 -- the long-term savings in terms of maintenance and water ends up helping pay for the field. A typical football or soccer or baseball field can use up to 4 million gallons of water a year.

"I think a lot of the decision to do this had to do with future water conservation," DiGiaimo said. "This (Valley High School) is a prototype. I can't guarantee we're going to do more fields, but as the drought gets more and more severe and we go to the drought emergency level I'm sure CCSD will be looking at it. But it's going to end up ultimately becoming a budgetary issue. Do you buy books or build synthetic turf fields?"

One of the only drawbacks for people who have played on FieldTurf in warmer climates is the fact that the rubber in the turf can warm up and retain heat. To keep the field cooler, grounds crews water down the surface to keep it more comfortable for the players.

According to DiGiaimo, the field at Valley High School is more like a testing ground for the school district and all the schools in the area to see if FieldTurf lives up to its billing.

"It's very difficult to give it to one school and not another," DiGiaimo said. "A firm decision has been made that this field will stay down for one season before the final evaluation is made on its performance and everything else. We actually want them (the football and soccer players) to try and beat the crap out of it."

The players will get to do just that starting Sept. 14, when the Vikings' freshman and junior varsity football teams play host to Durango. Valley's varsity quad gets to test out its new digs on Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. when it hosts Durango in the home opener.