New turf for U of L athletics
By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on July 13, 2022.
Athletes who play at the University of Lethbridge’s Community Stadium this season will have a brand-new feel under their feet in the form of new turf.Crews have been on the field replacing the turf for over a month now and the over $900,000 project is expected to be completed by Sunday.
The project was in discussions beginning three years ago.
“We’re delighted to be here in Lethbridge and to be able to replace the old turf field here now with literally our leading-edge system, our Field Turf core product,” said Kevan Pipe, Canada region Field Turf vice president.
The old turf had three pounds of infill per square foot and Field Turf has come in and installed 9.2 pounds of infill per square foot.
“So over the course of this entire field, we’re putting in about a million pounds of infill,” said Pipe.
“We have epidemiological studies that have been published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that has compared different systems with regards to injury rates for high school and college football, men’s and women’s college and high school soccer and the infill weight is one of the biggest factors in terms of protecting player safety and player health. Possibly, the single biggest thing is you should see a big difference in terms of the way players are reacting to the field in terms of a health and safety view point. With this turf system, we’re using our Field Turf Core Fibre, which is the thickest, strongest fibre that we’ve ever developed in our history.”
Soccer players give most of the feedback on the type of turf.
Pipe said the way the fibre is structured, it’s a dual polymer system.
“It’s called Core because it has an inner core to it, which means that fibre is standing up straighter for a longer period of time,” he said.
“…So the ball fibre interaction, which soccer players really need to have, in order to control the ball in the feet to run a play and so on, so they’re able to play a much more efficient game on this product than you would’ve seen previously where in many respects it probably would have been a roller ball-type of situation.”
“We actually had to bring Field Turf in to do some maintenance on the old field and they did a quick survey of it and said, ‘Yeah it’s starting to get down towards to the end of its life’,” said Bill Halma, U of L’s executive director of recreation.
“Obviously the first year of COVID, we didn’t do much on the field because there wasn’t much going on. But then this past fall, we noticed a bunch of the turf was starting to tear up. So we figured it was time to get at this.”
The new field has created partnerships that will also allow spectators to see local high school logos on the north end zone.
“That’s something we wanted to do as a value added for the schools,” said Halma.
The south end zone will have the two U of L logos and the new city logo.
U of L has joined 34 other Canadian USports with similar systems. 2
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