Field of Dreams (continued)

Building the Dream

The new football field has a Sportexe Momentum artificial turf surface laid down over a gravel bed with an advanced drainage system. After the substrate was installed, the turf was rolled out in 10-yard-wide lengths stretching across the field. Each section was stitched to its neighbor with a special mobile sewing machine, and then stretched, smoothed, and trimmed to await the installation of the next section. The five-yard lines were prefabricated in the strips; the one-yard markers and logos were stitched and glued by hand into spaces cut out of the green turf. Finally the “grass carpet” was impregnated with a mixture of rubber granules and sand for added resiliance and traction. (The granules can be seen in the band photo on the opposite page as dark shading in the grey and white letters of the word moravian; they will work their way down into the turf with time and use.)

The Mondo Super X track is a natural rubber surface with a geometrically molded bottom layer, prefabricated in Mondo’s Italian factory to the exact specs of the site and installed over a macadam substrate. Olympic 100-meter champion Justin Gatlin described using it in Athens in 2004 as “like running on air.”

Above, left to right, the view from the grandstand as the strips of turf are laid down across the field, the unrolling of a section, and the stitching of a new section to its neighbor. Bottom, greyhounds being installed in the end zone; the letters are held down with weights until the glue dries.

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