What’s a Typical Timeline for a Grass-to-Turf Conversion?

Chris Piper looks out at the crew installing a new football field at Troy Memorial Stadium and marvels at how quickly the work is being completed. “It’s really amazing how fast they have moved and continue to move,” says Piper, superintendent of Troy (Ohio) City Schools.

The overall pace of converting grass to synthetic turf — from concept to fundraising to installation — at the 10,500-seat stadium, as well as at a district soccer stadium, has been a bit more glacial. It’s mid-July, and the Trojans’ Aug. 23 football home opener can’t come soon enough for Piper, who has been shepherding the turf conversion since May 26, 2022, when the district’s preferred architect provided an initial project estimate.

“We’ve known for a while that we wanted turf,” Piper says. “However, we didn’t have the district funds to allocate toward that, nor did we really want to do that, because the district had other needs. We had just passed a bond issue to build new school buildings. We certainly didn’t want the public to have the perception that we were willing to allocate district dollars putting in synthetic turf but unwilling to dedicate district dollars to build new schools.”

A local family whose children had played soccer at Troy committed $1 million toward turf conversion at both venues. A committee of community members — independent of the school district — then formed to raise the balance of funds toward a goal exceeding $3 million (the soccer stadium would involve concrete, fence, lighting and seating components, in addition to turf). “The initial gift was a $1 million offer, and then, ultimately, that same family came back with an additional quarter-million,” says Piper, adding that the pipeline slowed considerably from there. “It took a while. It took a couple of years. It actually took us a little longer than we thought it would. Funds weren’t exactly flying in. It took a lot of hard work from a few people on that committee.”

According to Steven Torbeck, senior fields consultant specializing in synthetic turf for Cincinnati-based The Motz Group, Troy’s two-years-plus process falls within the typical range of grass-to-turf conversion timelines, particularly when factoring for fundraising. “That’s probably the area where there’s the most variance,” Torbeck says. “We worked with a private school in Indianapolis back in 2013, and we just put the field in last year. It just can take time to get people on board and commit to a project of that size and scope.”

Step by step

AB asked Torbeck to walk us through the actual steps of conversion, which unfold fairly predictably once funding is secured.

“The general rule of thumb is that it’s probably at minimum a year prior to playing on a new field that the owner should have a pretty good idea what that project is going to consist of and where the money is going to come from,” he says. “We’ve had processes that go a lot faster than that, but I think everybody’s in a much better spot if you give yourself at least 12 months of time.”

The Motz Group has installed more than 700 synthetic turf fields, and virtually every project has varied somewhat. But even Troy Memorial Stadium, which opened in 1947, can serve as a timeline guide for other grass-to-turf conversions. “A lot of the fields that we do — especially if it’s a football/soccer multipurpose stadium — have a track around them, much like Troy Memorial does, which means you’re starting as soon as track season is over and you want to be done certainly before their first football game, and ideally in time for them to practice for a few weeks on that field,” says Torbeck, adding that June 1 to Aug. 1 or Aug. 15 is a typical time frame for actual onsite construction.

Step 1 – Excavation
“You have a couple of weeks to excavate it down to subgrade,” Torbeck says. “We’re essentially digging out that crown, digging out all of that organic material, and we’re getting down to a subgrade — a building pad, if you will — that’s firm enough for us to install the field on top of.”

Not only do native soils vary from field to field, but they can vary within the same field, according to Torbeck. “You could still run into a corner of a field that’s got unsuitable soils — silty, soft soils — that you need to over excavate and add more stone to ultimately provide that foundation for the field,” he says. “Generally speaking, that’s 8 inches below the finished grade of the new field and a couple thousand cubic yards of spoils and organics that you’re removing. If you have to do some type of undercutting or stabilization, that adds a little bit of time, but most excavations are still two to four weeks.”

Step 2 – Drainage
The field’s drainage system consists of perforated high-density polyethylene pipes that either surround the perimeter of the field or stretch the length of the field down the center. In the latter case, one main collector measuring anywhere from 12 to 36 inches in diameter is fed by smaller, often 4-inch pipes called finger drains spaced 20 to 30 feet on center, or 1-by-12-inch flat panels that sit atop the subgrade.

An architect — Kleingers, in the case of Troy City Schools — should be able to advise as to what the local jurisdiction requires in terms of storm-water management. “They’re ultimately running drainage calculations to determine how much drainage is needed, and we would know that prior to giving final price, going under contract and putting a shovel in the ground,” says Torbeck, adding that drainage installation should take a week or two.

Step 3 – Stone
Once pipes are in place, “you’re going to basically fill up that hole that you dug with stone,” Torbeck says. In Ohio, that means a 4.5-inch-deep layer of No. 57 washed limestone, topped with another 1.5 inches of finer No. 8 or No. 9 washed limestone, for a total of 6 inches between the subgrade and the actual turf system. “It has to be washed, because what you’re doing with that stone profile is using void space as storage for the storm water. If you have a bunch of fines in it, that’s now getting into your pipes and slowing things down, which ends up being a problem down the road from a drainage perspective.”

The Motz Group prefers to use a laser box grader when leveling the stone to achieve the tightest tolerances possible, with the entire stone installation adding another two weeks to the conversion process.

Step 4 – Shock Pad
End-users have the option of having turf installed directly on top of the stone or having a shock pad cover the stone first, as was the choice of Troy City Schools. Shock pads can take the form of a rolled good or interlocking “puzzle” pieces. In either case, installation can be completed within days.

Step 5 – Turf
Torbeck explains that as the aforementioned stages of site preparation unfold, the crew is also installing a concrete curb around the field’s perimeter. As the key component of this curbing, a nailer board of 2-by-4-inch pressure-treated lumber or composite lumber is incorporated. The turf “carpet” is stretched across the width of the field in 15-foot-wide sections (with a white stripe of tufted fibers along one edge to depict the finished field’s yard lines in 5-yard increments), attached to neighboring sections on their undersides using seaming tape and a specialized all-weather adhesive, and tacked to the nailer board every 2 feet or so. The entire process in some ways resembles the installation of wall-to-wall carpeting in a home, and it can take another week.

“From there is when it kind of seems to slow down to the layperson, because a lot of the tedious things come into play,” Torbeck says. “Your main 5-yard lines on a football field are actually tufted into the carpet, so we’re not cutting and gluing that into the field — but all of your hash marks, all of your logos, all of your letters, soccer lines, lacrosse lines, etcetera, that all gets cut out of the green turf and a different color turf gets glued in. They’re called inlays. That is after the field ‘goes green,’ as we call it.

“Let’s say a typical high school field has football, soccer and maybe one other sport. The process of doing all of those inlays is maybe a week or two — two at most. That’s probably the most weather-dependent portion of the turf install. If it’s raining or it’s super cold — because we do these fields in the wintertime, too — we really can’t do that piece of the puzzle.”

Step 6 – Infill
Once the turf is in place and properly marked, the application of infill can begin and last about a week. Large, tow-behind spreaders apply the material — in most cases, sand and crumb rubber — which is promptly worked into the system with a rotating broom. “When that carpet gets installed, it looks like ’70s shag, because it’s all kind of laid over,” Torbeck says of the field before brooming. “What you’re doing is popping the fibers back up, you’re getting infill into the system, and that infill will help give the field ballast and vertical integrity to the fibers. Most systems are somewhere between an inch and a quarter to an inch and three-quarters of infill depth.”

Step 7 – Substantial Completion
At this point, the field is ready to be turned over to the end user, with the warranty set to kick in. “We do the walkthrough, identify any punch-list items,” Torbeck says. “Usually the punch-list items are taken care of that same day. I guess occasionally we might have some things that take an extra day or two to do, but that’s usually a time we get to the point of ‘Hey, let’s walk the field and make sure you have everything you need.’ ”

A new era — now

When AB spoke to Piper in July, the district was still short of funds for the completion of the stadium and soccer field projects, which combined will cost $3.9 million, but it had decided to break ground anyway. “The football field was pretty much just putting turf in, which is saying a lot, but our soccer complex was more, because we added lighting over there. We had to do some fence work, concrete work. New bleachers were a part of that plan. Pouring concrete for team benches,” he says. “When we ultimately broke ground was when we had enough money to get everything done except for our bleachers. We are still about $300,000 shy of our ultimate fundraising goal, but we decided that the bleachers we have will suffice for now, because to put this project off for another year did not seem reasonable. So, we broke ground immediately this summer, as soon as school was out.”

Piper, a former athletic director, has held a big-picture view of this conversion all along. “For me, as superintendent, I’d like to speak a little bit about what turf is going to do for us here. For Troy City Schools, our football tradition goes back very far. And this is, I think, the seventh-largest stadium in the state. It is unique in that it has equal bleachers on both sides. That goes back to our greatest football rival, and I would say the greatest football rivalry here in Ohio — Troy versus Piqua, our neighbor to the north. Both of us have beautiful football stadiums, but we have not been able to use this football stadium for playoff games.”

Piper explains that the Ohio High School Athletic Association only hosts regional playoff games at neutral sites that feature synthetic turf. “Because we had grass here, we couldn’t get tournament games here, which was a shame, because this is a top-notch facility,” he says. “Now that we have turf, we will be a great host site for regional games, and that’s going to bring commerce and activity. It will be a real benefit to our community to have that.”

But the benefits of conversion don’t end there. “We used to play soccer on that grass football field, but when you put a soccer field inside a football stadium, it really limits the field of play for soccer,” Piper adds. “Our soccer field in the past was 56 yards wide. It’s now 70 yards wide, so it’s going to fundamentally change the game of soccer here at Troy in a positive way. It will also make it a very nice tournament site for soccer games, so, again, bringing people to Troy, to our community.

“And then for me, one of the biggest things is a safety perspective, because we couldn’t use the grass field to practice on. We didn’t have enough room on our campus to have all our athletes practice, so all of my soccer athletes were traveling off campus to get practice time in a local park. And for a superintendent, anytime your kids leave campus, you get a little nervous about safety issues. It’s going to be great that our kids can be safe, can practice here and practice on the field that they’re going to play on. It’ll be a real benefit for our student-athletes.”