IN SEASON RESODDING By Tony Leonard

In season resodding used to be considered a sign of failure and bad management by the sports field manager. It’s time to change that perception and make it a part of our standard management practices.

Sports field managers all take pride and ownership, but it’s the owner’s field. We need to understand the goals of the club and find solutions that make business sense and make the club money. Our Philadelphia Eagles’ Lincoln Financial Field must handle much more than the wear and tear of ten NFL games. We have a desirable city and an owner that welcomes national and international events. Our field use includes college games, national and international soccer, lacrosse, concerts, movie and TV shoots, and multiple corporate and other special events.

We can keep a natural grass field safe and playable, but it also must look good through the year for those viewing it in person and on TV. Events held on the field during inclement weather could make it necessary to resod. So could vandalism. We need to replace the end zones and other field logos because, in most cases, painting over a logo is not an acceptable option with the scrutiny our field receives. Our owners, president, general manager, coaches and players have high expectations and they compare our field to other fields.

Te field is a media talking point during pregame shows as well as during the games. Improved high definition (HD) TV technology and larger screens project a picture so clear you could probably identify the cultivars in the field. Phone cameras and social media provide instant sharing. Te NFL has established field quality requirements in multiple areas, including sheer strength.

Our role as sports field manager in this type of position is now similar to an event manager. We need to keep as much of the detail covered as we can. We need to manage the events from load-in all the way through load-out and prepare a safe field for the next event. We must have a plan "A" and a plan "B" for every situation. We need to use our magic wand and crystal ball—along with our understanding of agronomics and turfgrass science, our weather forecasting abilities and our experience—to predict when our field will wear out prior to that happening. We don’t want the field to begin to fail during a game or, even worse, during a pregame warmup. Yet a lot of facility managers want to hold off on in season resodding as long as possible, so we need to communicate well.

Our Story

Our stadium field was installed in 2002 with a sand-based soil profile and was sodded with Kentucky bluegrass. DD GrassMaster fibers were installed in the spring of 2003 for additional support. Our first event was in 2003, a soccer game between Manchester United and FC Barcelona. We then hosted three sold out Bruce Springsteen concerts, held on Friday, Saturday and Monday nights while our football team was at training camp. We couldn’t resod because of DD GrassMaster. So we heavily overseeded the roadway and used green dye for better aesthetics when the football season kicked off a week later with NFL and college games.

In 2004, we overseeded with Kentucky bluegrass and some perennial rye. We stayed with cool-season grasses for four years, even though the stadium is surrounded with concrete. We’d overseed every spring and, with the help of our inground heating system, be ready for play in June. We had no concerts for four years.

Tony Leonard has been Director of Grounds for the Philadelphia Eagles since 1999.

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Patriot and Riviera, the first two cold-tolerant bermudagrasses from Oklahoma State University, were performing well for those using them and we lined up with those locations geographically. After talking to a lot of folks, we made the decision to go with bermuda starting in 2007. No other fields combined DD GrassMaster with bermudagrass. We sprigged with Patriot in March of 2007 to establish it before our mid-June Kenny Chesney concert. Patriot bruises badly, but the rhizomes and stolons were still green and we had seven to eight weeks with no events for the recovery. Te field looked good for the first game. Seeing the tufts fly out was a different experience, but with our sweeping and mowing, it cleaned up. Unfortunately, bermudagrass slows down for us in October and media comments on the “different color” began. We knew that wouldn’t get better and made the decision to resod with thick cut Kentucky bluegrass right over the existing field after the Temple game.

TPI Turf News March/April 2017