Field of dreams: Lions Field gets a new surface, ready for first game

MOSES LAKE — Lions Field is going to look a little different when the Moses Lake High School Chiefs line up and snap the ball for the season’s first football game.

It’s brand new. Greener. And the white lines are much brighter.

“It looks really good, and we can’t wait to play on it this weekend,” said Moses Lake High School Athletic Director Loren Sandhop.

Sandhop said the old synthetic turf, which was installed about 15 years ago, had become too compacted and posed too much of a risk of injury to players.

“It was time to replace it,” he said. “This has been on my radar for five years.”

Workers with FieldTurf, which has installed artificial turf for the Seattle Seahawks at CenturyLink Field and at serious football colleges like Notre Dame and The Ohio State University, have been busy in the last week installing new artificial turf over the old field at 715 W. Fourth Ave., literally sewing in giant panels of turf and then spreading alternating layers of sand and rubber to prepare the playing surface.

“This is only our second recovery that we’ve done in Washington,” said Michael Glidden, the FieldTurf foreman overseeing the work at Lions Field. “We come in, we taper the edges, we clean up the old stuff and lay the stuff on top of it.”

Glidden said his crew has laid about 40 panels of turf, stretched them and then sewed them into the previous turf. Those panels only contain the 5-yard lines, Glidden said, because professional, college and high school rules for marking fields are all a little different.

To put in the hash markers, yard numbers and the yellow lines outlining the soccer field, Glidden said workers shaved lines in the turf and then sewed those in individually.

Afterward, Glidden said they laid down two layers of sand, a layer of finely shredded rubber, repeated that, and then were busy covering it with four layers of rubber. They also swept each layer with a special machine to ensure the rubber and sand were distributed evenly, Glidden said.

“We have 545,000 pounds of sand and 240,000 pounds of rubber,” he said.

While the new turf layer is stapled at the edges to hold it down, the tons of sand and rubber will do the real work of holding the turf down, and will eventually reduce the visible length of the blades from nearly 3 inches to roughly half-an-inch, Glidden said.

“The rubber is to make it soft and the sand is to hold it in place. And for drainage,” Glidden said.

Sandhop said turf is “softer and more forgiving” and doesn’t require anywhere near as much maintenance as a grass field.

“It’s ready 24/7, and we don’t have to water it, mow it, fertilize it, or paint it. And we can go from football to soccer in a matter of minutes,” he said.

Sandhop said the project cost the school district around $600,000, and compared replacing turf to replacing worn out carpeting in a house.

“You don’t buy carpet and expect it to last for 300 years,” he said.

Sandhop said the new turf should be ready and inspected in time for a Friday practice and the first game on Saturday — a non-conference match-up with Bothell beginning at 4 p.m.