Md. SoccerPlex enters next phase of dramatic fields renovation

When the average American mows their lawn, they give their grass the equivalent of a haircut.

The process currently taking place on the playing surface of the Championship Stadium at the Maryland SoccerPlex in Germantown, Md. looks more like a scalping – but an eventual payoff is expected in the form of a better-than-new field with improved performance in all areas.

Inspired by the practices of top European professional clubs, the facility’s turf management crew has spent the past few weeks on this multi-phase process, using advanced equipment that few others in the United States possess.

In less than a month the surface is expected to be fully reborn with a lush covering of the latest generation of tough, water-efficient grass blends.

To help prepare for his complex’s sweeping field renovation project, which also involves lighting, new surfaces and other major improvements to several other fields, SoccerPlex sports turf manager Jerad Minnick spent several weeks visiting facilities across Europe earlier this year. He was particularly amazed to see many of his counterparts using stripping and seeding processes to refresh their surfaces, rather than sodding, which in the US is the norm for renovations like the one he was planning for the Championship Stadium.

“One thing that I really took away from my conversation with the groundsman at Manchester United – he was stripping the field [at Old Trafford] and renovating it 28 days before having 8 games in 11 days for the Olympics,” Minnick explained to Soccer Wire. “At first I thought, ‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.’ Then I got to thinking about it, and when I went to Arsenal, it was the same thing, and even at Real Madrid – same thing.

“The thing about Europe is, they’re really, really open-minded.”

So he decided to try it himself – nervous about a new technique, but knowing that he had a slightly larger time window ahead of the Championship Stadium’s major event of the fall, the Atlantic Coast Conference’s men’s soccer championships.

He and his team first used unique British-made machinery to strip away the top few inches of their stadium field’s existing surface, all the way down to the sand base that was laid more than a decade ago (the grass and soil pulled up was trucked away to be reused elsewhere at the facility).

This removed years’ worth of accumulated organic buildup as well as the infestations of poa, an invasive weed grass which shows up as pale green blotches on playing fields.

New sand was laid down and graded level via laser technology, seeded with the latest strain of performance bluegrass, then aerated and watered regularly. Minnick says that newer breeds of bluegrass grow in more aggressively, and have a longer life cycle that starts earlier in the spring and ends later in the fall. And the latest versions are only available in seed form, because by the time sod is ready for installation, the strain used to grow it is already a few years old.

Some of the field’s older bluegrass and rye grasses may survive and continue as well.

“The crown [of the plant] is there,” he explained of the European approach. “Some plants regenerate, some plants don’t. They want it to be the survival of the fittest…They always want the plant to be no more than two, three years old.”

Hot August weather followed quickly by a round of thunderstorms in early September threatened to complicate matters a bit. So the SoccerPlex crew laid down a protective layer of recycled paper mulch before the heavy rains hit, and the project has otherwise gone smoothly.

Minnick expects the new surface to drain more efficiently, require less water and be capable of withstanding more use than before – all thanks to a process which costs many thousands of dollars less than laying down sod.