by Dave Rogers
www.panews.com
A former all-state and all-conference player with nearly 30 years of experience in high school coaching, Port Neches-Groves’ Matt Burnett can talk football with the best of them.
He’s quickly becoming an expert on artificial turf, too.
“I didn’t realize there was more than one company making artificial turf,” he said recently. “Just about everybody calls it FieldTurf, but there’s a bunch of them in the business. And every one of them offered different things with it.”
The $123 million bond issue passed by PN-GISD patrons in May included money for a renovation of Indian Stadium that will include a new artificial turf football field and all-weather track.
The school district hasn’t chosen a supplier/contractor for the field and track, which are expected to cost a total of $1.25 million to install, the coach said. School board members should review bids and award contracts this fall.
“It’s supposed to be ready to go for 2008,” Burnett said. “As soon as we finish our football season, they’ll start working on it. They’re going to start the process of putting in a new track and jumping pits, taking out the grass field and putting in a new base and drainage.”
PN-G would become home to the first artificial turf football field in the Golden Triangle, but hardly the only one in the area.
But it isn’t only stadiums that host more than one varsity football game a week that get a workout.
“The reason we want artificial turf is because we don’t have an auxiliary stadium here,” Burnett said. “By the time football season is over, our field is a little thin because we play middle school games, junior varsity games, freshman A and B football and our varsity games on the field.
“And if we get a little rain like we do in this part of the world, by the time football ends, it’s a little bit weak. And then here comes soccer.
Artificial turf has been around since AstroTurf was created for the world’s first domed stadium, the Houston Astrodome, in the mid-60s.
“All AstroTurf was was carpet with a little bit of foam under it,” recalls the PN-G coach who played in the Astrodome as a high school, college and pro player in the 1970s. “It was very abrasive. You’d get scrapes (’carpet burns’) when you fell on it and it was very hard. There wasn’t a lot of give.”
Then a “next generation” of artificial grass was invented and began gaining in popularity in the late 1990s.
FieldTurf was patented in 1982. It is composed of monofilament polyethylene blend fibers tufted into a polypropylene backing with a mixture of silica sand and recycled rubber crumbs called “infill.”
‘FieldTurf is great,’ says Baytown Lee head coach Dick Olin, whose team shares Stallworth Stadium with crosstown rival Baytown Sterling.
“With FieldTurf, our soccer games are played at the stadium now and it’s great,” Olin said. “You talk about field abuse, you look at our subvarsity stadium. Those kids are playing on dirt. Now, on Friday night, you know you’re going to have a good surface. Even in bad weather, it’s great.”
With its artificial turf stadium at the school and not, like Baytown Lee, at a crosstown neutral site, PN-G can use it for practices, too. And not just for the sports teams.
“The big selling point of this is,” Burnett said, “we don’t have to tell anybody ‘No.’ The band can march on it any time they want if the football team’s not there. The soccer team can practice as much as they want. PE classes can throw bases on it and go out there and play baseball and softball on a rainy day.
“I think FieldTurf makes a lot of sense in this part of country. All the weather we get, the rain. We feel it’s going to benefit a lot of people.”
