What is FieldTurf?

The FieldTurf concept is simple. The best surface for athletic contests - American football, soccer, rugby, lacrosse, baseball, and softball - is good natural grass. And synthetic turf should be like grass, not carpet. FieldTurf’s inventors were sportsmen - not carpet makers. Former players and coaches, not turf salesmen. They approached the challenge from a completely different perspective. They wanted to develop a synthetic system that offered the beneficial biomechanical properties of natural grass, combined with the best attributes of a durable synthetic system: all-weather playability, low maintenance, and unlimited playing time.
      The idea was simple. Looks Like Grass… Feels Like Grass…Plays Like Grass. But the technology to make it happen was not simple at all. After several years of hard work, after trials, tests, consultations with players, coaches, trainers and doctors, sample plots, equipment modifications, and countless formulations, FieldTurf was born. Initially introduced for tennis and golf, then modified for soccer, and finally perfected even for American football and baseball, FieldTurf revolutionized the turf industry, and in many ways, the entire world of sport.

    FieldTurf’s patented system is the first choice for elite athletic venues worldwide: Seattle Seahawks, Oakland Raiders, Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, New York Jets and Giants, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, St. Louis Rams, New England Patriots, fourteen NFL installations plus more than thirty NCAA installations, including Nebraska, Kansas State, Oregon, Washington and Washington State.
      In the ever growing sport of Soccer, in the US and around the world, top leagues and teams practice and play on FieldTurf, including: English and Scottish Premier Leagues; Germany's Bundesliga; Spain's Primera Liga; Japan's JFA; and Russia's Lokomotiv and CSKA.
      In the US, several FieldTurf fields have earned “FIFA Recommended” status and FieldTurf was recently selected as the surface for the new USSF Home Depot National Training Center at California State Univeristy, Dominquez Hills. How did an upstart company become the industry leader with over 750 installations worldwide in just a few short years? Pure innovation.
FieldTurf is dramatically different from traditional synthetic turf. The most striking difference is immediately obvious. Instead of a dense, abrasive rug, FieldTurf’s fiber surface is soft, silky - like new blades of grass in a spring meadow. Players can slide, tackle and tumble on FieldTurf’s unique blend of specially treated Polyethylene fibers without fear of abrasions. Rug burns are a thing of the past. The old hatred of “turf” - voiced so loudly by players, trainers, coaches, the media, even parents and doctors - simply vanishes, a distant memory from the rough “carpet age.”     

      But FieldTurf is much more than just the absence of abrasions. Unlike traditional turf, FieldTurf does not rely on an underlying shock pad for safety, resilience and player comfort. Rather, like its natural grass cousin, FieldTurf’s grass fibers are surrounded and stabilized by a special blend of “synthetic earth” - FieldTurf’s patented mixture of smooth, rounded silica sand, rubber granules, and NIKE GRIND made of re-ground athletic shoe material.
      The rubber granules are a key component. Tire rubber is cryogenically frozen, shattered into smooth, clean, rounded particles, sized and shaped to stay “in suspension” with the sand, which is of a similar size, shape and weight. The sand and rubber are precision layered to guarantee uniformity, with an installation process that is also patented.

     The result: A stable, resilient, uniform, shock-absorbing surface. FieldTurf is the original and only system emulating natural grass, ideal not only for athletes at the elite level but for everyday activities of active, competitive young people.

    The design of the FieldTurf fabric is radically different. FieldTurf is the original wide gauge, tall pile fabric, and this design is also patented. The distance between the rows of fibers tufted into the backing is very wide, and related directly to the height of the pile fibers. The taller the pile, the wider the distance between the fibers. This patented formula means the special filling or “synthetic earth” that is layered into the pile fibers is carefully controlled in terms of weight, density and thickness.

    Why is this so important? The designers at FieldTurf discovered that the only way to truly emulate natural grass is to combine all these elements into an integrated system. The tall pile, wide gauge design allows cleated shoes to penetrate the fibers, plant into the special sand/rubber infill, twist easily and release (with minimal torsional resistance).

     This design accounts for the documented reduction in lower extremity injuries and significantly reduced neural injuries of players who compete on FieldTurf, even compared to natural grass!
Injury Incidence Study ’03 – Bill S. Barnhill, MD

Barnstable Red Raiders in Collegiate Football

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