There’s a good chance that the ground beneath the players’ feet isn’t ground at all if you walk into practically any high school stadium in America today. Thermoplastic fiber, rubber crumble, and synthetic backing make up this manufactured surface, which costs about $1 million to install and contains enough corporate fingerprints to give a school board lawyer the creeps. Although there has been a simmering debate about artificial turf since the 1960s, things have changed recently. The voice of the money has grown louder.
Josh Murnane, the district’s activities director, was open about the situation when Neenah High School in Wisconsin witnessed a conference-champion lacrosse team being bumped off their own field due to the grass’s extreme deterioration. “It’s a million-dollar question. “Literally,” he remarked. For a high school playing field, that amount—a million dollars—seems astounding. Perhaps more illuminating, though, is what prevents schools from merely fixing the issue: their refusal to display sponsor logos on the field. The school board in Neenah would not permit it. And the grass remains in the absence of that corporate funding.
It becomes interesting at this point. Schools across the nation that have switched frequently did so due to branded end zones and naming rights agreements, which resemble minor-league sports businesses more than public education. The fifty-yard line was covered with the logo of a nearby bank. The name of a car dealership was sewn into the field’s corner. Even though it’s possible that no one planned for high school football to become a billboard, there’s a feeling that it did so inadvertently.
In an odd way, the history of synthetic turf is idealistic. It originated from a Ford Foundation project called Chemgrass, which was later renamed AstroTurf following its Astrodome debut, with the goal of providing safer play areas for urban children. At the time, the manager of the Astros referred to his stadium as “a real Utopia for baseball.” Less impressed, Leo Durocher described it as a “ten-cent infield in a forty-five million dollar park.” The conflict between enthusiasm and skepticism persisted throughout the discussion.
It has only gotten worse due to health issues. Rug burns that never fully heal, MRSA infections, and concerns about the rubber crumb infill and its potential to seep into the skin are not minor issues. Following skin scrapes on artificial turf—the kind of abrasion that occurs on a typical Friday night—Dr. Stuart Shalat of Georgia State has highlighted the true risk of MRSA. In the 1970s, the NFL Players Association demanded that the installation of synthetic turf be prohibited. Parents at suburban high schools are still looking up the same questions on Google fifty years later.
Nevertheless, the fields continue to grow. There are currently over 11,000 synthetic turf fields in the US, and the number is growing every season. There is durability. The costs of maintenance are actual. In the winter months of Wisconsin, a grass field is a real issue, not a theoretical one. Schools aren’t always able to wait for that decision, but it’s still unclear if the health risks outweigh the useful advantages.
In reality, more than just turf is at risk. It has to do with who owns the commercial and visual identity of locations where teenagers spend their most important athletic moments. Perhaps a corporate logo on a high school field is insignificant. Perhaps it isn’t. In the words of Murnane, “If you’re a turf person, you’re a turf person.” Beneath that simplicity, however, lies a much messier debate about funding, safety, and the precise obligations a public school has to the community, as well as what it can afford to sell.
