cold and wet through most of spring football practice, which didn’t help. Ten, due to delays on the construction projects, we hosted our men’s and women’s lacrosse practices and games during the spring of 2018. Te field took more of a beating.”
Tere’s a lacrosse story, that Carrick says, “Was not at all funny when it happened; but looking back, it is funny now. We held graduation on our Kenan Memorial Stadium field, which we always do, and had the big stage up for over a week. We had planned to strip out the old sod, grade, and then resod right afterward, to let the field grow in for the summer.
“Our women’s lacrosse team was competing in the NCAA Tournament. Tey’d played their first round at a local high school on a Field Turf synthetic field, but a nice one. Our coach prefers to play on grass and on campus and asked us it would be possible to play the second game on the Kenan field. She really wanted to take her team to the Final Four. We told her the field would be in bad shape, but when we walked the field with her, she said, ‘It’s not the perfect field that you guys usually have, but we’d prefer to play on it.’ If we thought the field wasn’t ready safety-wise, we wouldn’t have agreed, but though it didn’t look the best, it was safe and playable. So we decided not to resod it with that game three days away. Tat not only gave them natural grass but put them on our campus in our stadium which was great for the fans—and for the team with the fan support. Tey were ecstatic to play in the stadium for that game—and they made it to the Final Four.”
Here We Go Again Shortly after that lacrosse game, they did resod the field for the summer. Carrick says, “We were anticipating the new practice facility would open in August. Construction delays prevented that. So we used the game field for practices throughout August.”
Carrick tracked Kenan Memorial Stadium field use from August of 2017 through August of 2018: football practices – 111; football games – 7; football summer/winter workouts – 99; and lacrosse games/ practices – 24; for a total of 694 hours of field use.
Carrick says, “We didn’t know what we’d need for the stadium field beyond resodding it for our first home game, which was scheduled for September 15. Te world we’d been living in made it hard to plan, because so much depends on the weather. Not knowing if we’d need one field or four, we reached out to Chad again, and he saved GameOnGrass for us.” Price adds, “We went into the 2018 season with the same game plan; knowing it would take a lot of communication with tight scheduling, but also knowing we could make it work.”
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Carrick says, “It had been so wet here and more rain was predicted, so we moved that first resodding from Tursday, September 13, to Monday, September 10. Ten the September 15 game with the University of Central Florida was canceled because Hurricane Florence was moving in.”
Hurricane Florence hit the coast of the Carolinas with driving winds and heavy rains, retaining power as it moved inland. As Carrick was assessing storm damage for the UNC administrators and for FEMA, he reported, “We were okay. Te damage was not terrible on campus, but we had about nine feet of water on some of our fields off campus. Tose along the coast and to the east of us were hit much harder.”
Te partial resodding is complete.
Despite the storm, the football game between UNC and the University of Pittsburgh was played on the stadium field on Saturday, September 22. Carrick says, “Because of the cancellation, that was the first home game of the season and all went well. We did a middle of the field resod for the October 13 game against Virginia Tech and a complete field resod for our November 3 game against Georgia Tech.”
Carrick reported the decision was made to finish the year with practices and games on the stadium field and open the new practice facilities in the spring of 2019. Price adds, “Casey and I could both see that potentially developing and looked at the worst-case scenario, knowing if it would be the full season at the stadium, the GameOnGrass would give us the flexibility to make it work.” Carrick reports, “We didn’t use any new sod for the November 17 game. For our last home game, on November 24, we resodded 26,000 square feet down the middle of the field.”
TPI Turf News January/February 2019
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