The next trend in high school football fields?

[BARGuy]

Been spendin' some time in the Atlanta, GA area this winter. With all the rain/snow I've had time to read the paper. And according to the Journal/Constitution, Cobb county high schools are slated & fundedfor artificial turf on the football fields! To the tune of about a million $ each!

This may be old hat to some of you, but it blows me away! Am I really out of the loop, or is this the coming thing?

They're laying off teachers & yet their gonna dump 1M per school into plastic grass for fields that are used 10-15 times a year?

And selfishly, when they abandon that field 20 years from now, there won't be any targets for my grandsons to dig! They've already concreted the areas around the concession stand.

Sometimes progress smells!

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Cry Of The Eagle: History And Legends Of The Cherokee Indians And Their Buried Treasure - Grab it through Amazon!

[BIG61AL]

It's just silly how much schools will spend on a few students and make the rest do with less. What is wrong with grass and dirt?

 

[Woodland Detectors]

Oh I feel you my friend.

I agree

 

[goldie1959]

alot of taxpayers should be at either the school board raising cain or at your own meetings or some petitions going around or better yet ALLOF THE ABOVE!!!!!!!!! kids having free lunches and people in shelters or homeless because of the economy and they want turf. let me tell you alot of places that had turf, removed it because of increased injuries . wasn't this an issue in major league baseball and pro football awhile back? right is right and wrong is wrong.

 

[Sandman]

More like someone is getting a kick back on the purchase of the plastic grass. Injuries will go up, but that won't mean anything to the school board.

 

[jeff741972]

I have delivered sand to a few place for these special fields, he is a link to one that wasn't sand but dirt for the softball field (yeah dirt from 400 miles away )

http://dc.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/X...0&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http://www.madeira.org/

And this one was making 2 or 3 brand new astro turf fields, not only for football, but soccer as well, what I found intresting was some old broken pottery at this site on the edges of where they where working. I would imagine going on here with a MD would not end well.

http://www.mercersburg.edu/podium/default.aspx?t=125644

Nice tuition's on both of these, guess it would make sense for the kids to have high end fields.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

To add some balance, there is counter-arguments from the pro-artificial crowd, that 1) it is less expensive, not more expensive, over the long haul. Therefore the cost is a better investment. Reason: maintenance costs of mowing and watering are now ZERO. And it can be used year-round (as opposed to muddy fields which are unusable). 2) there is DECREASED injuries (some will argue) because without gopher holes, no more twisted ankles.

You can kiss turf hunting goodbye once a field has been converted to artificial turf, of course. But don't forget, in the process of initially constructing it, they have to scrape off the grass, to prep. for the incoming layer of artificial turf. There is a short-term opportunity to harvest coins, during the scrape process. Some friends and I got in on one such project, at a late 1800's park in San Francisco, a few years back. When they scraped off a foot of soil, we got seateds, barbers, V's, etc... that would never have been regularly found in turf hunting. They were up to a foot or more deep prior to the scrape, and the park was heavily blighted with wino screw caps and zinc everywhere (so turf hunters in SF just avoided parks like this).

So pay attention to the news in your areas, when you see that a park or school is slated to receive artificial turf. If they're older schools/parks, BE THERE during the initial tractor scraping process (after 5pm when the workers cut out for the day, or course )

 

[Tubecity]

You can see it everywhere, schools not having money for scholastics & cutting programs like debating
teams, etc. . But they find the money for bigger, fancier stadiums, especially areas for refreshments &
sales of school logo hats, shirts, etc. These school boards & districts have gone from educating children
to becoming their own 'big business'. They are too far involved in politics today.

 

[sqwaby]

A few years ago the voters voted down a new stadium in my district. Four years prior the district spent 3.5 million to upgrade the old stadium with new bleachers, new concessions, regrade the field and plant new turf.. They wanted to tear down the improved one and spend 26 million to build the new one. One woman was going around saying it was a shame the conditions the kids had to play ball in. Some people seem to forget, it's kids playing a game.

 

[stefen]

Several years ago I was involved in the renovation of 18 schools in the Santa Monica / Malibu School District whereby all school sites are co-partnered with the City of Santa Monica Park District.

Simply stated, the practice football fields and stadiums are so impacted that they overtax the continual maintenance program.

We found that each field had a maximum of a 2 week annual recovery period which is totally inadequate...

A typical field can be resurfaced with artificial turf for as little as $240,000 and maintenance items such as irrigation repair, mowing, dethatching, fertilization, is totally eliminated, as well as, the cost of irrigation.

The life span is between 12 and 15 years and the cost can be amoritized in one (1) season.

That means that a cost exchange for a resurfaced field will reduce expenditures $3,000,000 to $5,000,000...

This, to me, is a valid justification considering factors such as regional microclimate, water management practices, desert environment, rising cost of education, and State budget vs Tax constraints.

Currently, we are in the midst of designing a public Baseball Stadium and will be introducing live turfgrass surfacing because of a different set of conditions and constraints.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Stefen, if any of those "18 schools" were older athletic fields, did you get the chance to md them right after the grubbing processes (where they take the grass off, but only down to a few inches, thus removing all the pesky tabs, zinc, clad, etc...)? And how about the subsequent const. phases where they dig down even further in the scraping process? As you know, incoming artificial turf is laid on a prepatory bed (for proper drainage qualities, compaction purposes, gradient preparation, etc....). The amount they'd be scraping off also depends on factors like needing to end up matching the height of the adjacent sidewalks, etc.... So it can be different depths of scrape, depending on the engineering to fit the location.

If a turfed site dates back over 100 yrs. old (let's say) and is heavily stratified (the older the coins, the deeper they tend to be), then a scrape job would be *just the ticket* to hunt in. But this window of time will be very short. Ie.: they might scrape one day, but be adding fill-material before that week is over!

I've gotten silver out of several such turf-scrapes, so if your job puts you in a position to know when these jobs are going to occur, you'd better get in there when the iron's hot

 

[stefen]

One or two of the schools were pre-WWII and the balance were post war.

One school had a raised basketball and tennis court platform about 4 feet above grade and about 250 feet square...

We later discovered was a concrete roof of an munitions bunker for a WWII Coastal anti-aircraft emplacement...

Couldn't find a entry and the Coast Guard just scratched their heads...this became a momentary crisis and that there was the potential of live ammo within several yards of the classrooms....

Had the School District forces bust a wall open so we could have a look-see...

Broom clean.

 

[RGINN]

Sports are the tail that wags the dog in public schools. And different sports are more important in different parts of the country. My son's High School started a track program, and they won State in cross-country. Which was remarkable for a no name non-existent team that practiced on country roads to pull off. The local paper celebrated this event by reprinting articles concerning the 1948 Girl's Basketball team winning state. And the lead line was 'It was much harder to win a state title then'. I was asked to leave the newspaper office over that one.

 

[Produce Guy]

I thought I'd tell you , all the high schools here in central Texas have been switched or will be switched over to next generation turf already,but the costs are not that high,more around $250,000-$500,000 each depending how nice(RICH) is the school distric.I'm not sure if it's worth it but nobody has really brought this up for discussion.