You might say it’s the hottest trend in prep sports.
In recent years, at least six area high schools (Shorewood, Greendale, Whitefish Bay, Arrowhead, Brookfield Central and Kettle Moraine) have switched their football fields to artificial turf. Others are in the early stages of planning. But while the evergreen turf cuts maintenance costs, it could have safety risks – and can get brutally hot on summer days.
Kettle Moraine High School recently finished a two-year fundraising project that netted $425,000 for a new synthetic field. That’s a lot of green, but the school will now save most of the $20,000 per year it spent on maintaining its natural field (for line painting, fertilizer, water, sod and labor). Will the field last long enough (20 years or more) to pay for itself? “Without a doubt,” says Mike Fink, Kettle Moraine’s athletic director and head football coach.
But relative costs may not matter to schools if they use special fundraising for a new field while slashing the property tax-funded budget for maintenance. For Kettle Moraine, it literally put the school on an even playing field, as two other schools in its conference now have artificial turf. This means the teams never have to practice on muddy or gouged-out fields. That provides “a slight advantage” competitively, Fink says.
“Synthetic turf is definitely the way to go,” says Kevin Murphy, football coach at Greenfield High School. He watched Woodland Conference rival Greendale open its artificial Brinkman Field in 2008, and he’d like to go synthetic, too.
But some raise concerns about the “crumb rubber” infill (some 3 to 6 inches of padding just below the “grass” surface). While it offers a soft landing, it’s composed of recycled tires, which can be problematic.
“A study out of Italy looked at 58 different brands of tires,” says Dr. David R. Brown, director of public health toxicology for the Connecticut nonprofit Environment & Human Health Inc. “Between one-third and 25 percent contained carcinogenic oils. Some had as much as two times the amount to cause concern for cancer.”
Fink isn’t convinced. “For every study that proves health risks, there’s one that says it is safe,” he notes. “We’re confident about the research that’s been done.”
Brown, however, says most pro-crumb rubber studies have been conducted by artificial turf companies and may examine only a small sampling of the rubber used. “There’s no idea where these tires are coming from,” he notes. “You can have tires from the U.S. with safe chemical makeup mixed in with tires from Taiwan and Korea that have high carcinogenic levels.”
Another safety concern is heat retention. A 2003 University of Missouri study showed that on a 98-degree day, the surface temperature of a synthetic field was in excess of 170 degrees, while natural grass was just 105 degrees.
No problem, says Fink: “We have the same watering system in place, so we can use water to cool the field down.”
There are non-tire infill options on the market, but they’re the most costly. Companies like Geo Safe Play use organic cork. The Green Bay Packers use a product called Desso GrassMaster, which features synthetic fibers interwoven with a natural grass turf.
“We didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the Packers’ facilities because it’s just too expensive,” Fink says. “We were satisfied that the product we selected is safe.”For $425,000, that doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
