County schools shun artificial turf

Comments (...)

Crystal Lake South football players huddle Oct. 9 on their football field. None of the high school fields in McHenry County have artificial turf. (Lauren M. Anderson - landerson@nwherald.com)

E-mail this story

Print this story

Comments

Share

While some schools in neighboring counties will worry little about the condition of their football fields during the second round of playoffs this weekend, teams in McHenry County are either scrambling to get fields in playing shape or are grateful to be playing on the road.

No McHenry County high schools have an artificial turf surface on which to play a football or soccer game. With the amount of rain that has fallen this season, fields have been under water at their worst, completely muddied and grass-less at their best.

By comparison, there are seven high schools in Lake County – Carmel, Grant, Grayslake Central, Grayslake North, Libertyville, Stevenson, Barrington and Lake Forest – with artificial turf manufactured by FieldTurf.

Communities that have convinced school boards and district administrators to go ahead with the expensive proposition of installing artificial turf have reaped the benefits in many ways.

But schools still dreaming of a life without fertilizer still could be years away from making turf a reality.

“I think, unfortunately for us, it’s going to have to be a situation where it would be based on each school being able to get one,” Crystal Lake South athletic director Jim Stuglis said. “A municipal field might not be worth it because we (in District 155) would all want to use it, and I’m not sure how well it would work.”

Artificial turf generally comes with a $500,000 price tag – an investment many school districts likely would not consider in a struggling economy. Should District 155 – which comprises Crystal Lake South, Crystal Lake Central Prairie Ridge and Cary-Grove – take on the project of installing turf in each of its four high school stadiums, the project could cost as much as $2 million.

Barrington athletic director Michael Obsuszt knows the expense often alienates community members, as well as the impression that turf is essentially “carpet on concrete,” as it was when it first was introduced in places such as the Houston Astrodome.

Barrington installed its artificial turf in 2008 and has not had maintenance problems with it since, Obsuszt said.

The school also revamped its entire stadium to the tune of $1.1 million, Obsuszt said, but $475,000 came from companies or families interested in sponsoring either the track, the stadium or the field on 10-year naming rights leases.

“Just the multiple uses that we get out of the field now is amazing,” Obsuszt said. “There are so many more events that can take place on our field. We never used to practice on our field, but now we run all our practices out there. We run our [physical education] classes on it. For us, the biggest advantage isn’t so much saving the costs of maintenance as it is what we can now do that we couldn’t before.

“It’s like we purchased brand-new land.”

Obsuszt said it’s not so much how quickly the artificial turf pays for itself, since he did not know what Barrington used to spend to maintain its field when it was natural grass. Calls to the District 155 maintenance department inquiring about maintenance costs were not returned.

But Crystal Lake Central athletic director Doug Blundy knows his crews were out “for a few hours” on Monday and Tuesday after Central’s game against Fenton on Friday, trying to get the field back in optimal playing condition for this Saturday’s game against Chicago De La Salle. The work includes rolling the field flat again, repainting it and trying to dry it as best as possible.

Football is not the only sport that suffers on poor field conditions. Soccer is nearly impossible to play in the mud and makes players change their strategies, Marian Central coach Mike Golda said.

“I think [the mud] caters to the run-and-gun style of play a lot more, but we couldn’t get any good touches on the ball or do any finesse in the conditions,” said Golda of playing the IHSA Class 2A sectional semifinal last week on Belvidere’s natural grass field, which was muddied after multiple days of rain. “[DeKalb] had to play in it, too, so it’s not a great excuse [for losing], but it did not make it easy for us to set up much offense or get anything going.”

“I hope that they are able to put one in somewhere [in McHenry County] because it’s not just high school events that could benefit from it,” South soccer coach Brian Allen said. “ ... It would be nice to have that option somewhere here, but I know it’s a huge financial inconvenience, especially with the economy the way it is right now.”

Comments