The inventor of synthetic turf, reinvented. AstroTurf® is one of the most iconic brands in American sports -- as legendary as the athletes who’ve battled on it. The brand that created the category is once again the leading innovator in synthetic turf.
American-owned and operated, AstroTurf® is the only synthetic turf brand with true vertical asset integration.
The Bills, off to their best start since 1992, keep the Rams winless. St. Louis Coach Scott Linehan benches quarterback Marc Bulger in favor of 38-year-old Trent Green.
For the first time in 16 years, the Buffalo Bills are 4-0. Unlike the previous two weeks, there was no need for late-game heroics. Jabari Greer's 33-yard interception return was the go-ahead score in an 18-point fourth-quarter salvo that finished off the go-for-broke St. Louis Rams, 31-14.
After three blowout losses and amid rumors he might be fired during the team's bye week, Rams Coach Scott Linehan benched quarterback Marc Bulger in favor of 38-year-old Trent Green. Linehan had six new starters in all, four on defense. The shakeup worked for a while, with rookie receiver Donnie Avery scoring on a 37-yard pitch and the defense sacking Trent Edwards four times in the first half. The Bills' first defensive score of the year -- also Greer's first career touchdown -- came off an overthrown pass.
The Bills look to improve to 5-0 this week at Arizona, before their bye week. The Bills return home to Ralph Wilson Stadium to face the San Diego Chargers on Sunday, October 19th. The Bills play their home games at Ralph Wilson Stadium on a state-of-the-art infilled GameDay Grass system from AstroTurf. Installed in 2003, the Bills have one of the longest-lasting synthetic turf surfaces in the NFL.
The Muhlenberg football team inched up another place in the D3football.com national poll. A 31-14 win at Union, combined with a loss by then-No. 4 St. John’s, allowed the Mules to move from No. 6 to No. 5.
Football is only the fourth sport in College history to be ranked in the top five in Division III. The others were men’s soccer (several times, most recently in 1996), softball (1991) and field hockey (1990).
Muhlenberg has won 13 consecutive regular-season games and, with a Homecoming win against Gettysburg on Saturday, will tie Dickinson (1987-88) for the second-longest streak in Centennial Conference history. McDaniel holds the CC record with 30 straight from 1997 to 1999.
The Mules return home this weekend to take on Gettysburg this Saturday at 1pm on their new AstroTurf GameDay Grass 3D field at Scotty Wood Stadium.
As sophomore midfielder Daneen Zug passed the ball to teammate Jessica Longstreth Wednesday against Princeton, a spray of water came up from the field when her stick slid across the surface.
However, it hadn't rained in State College in several days. The Penn State field hockey team plays on an Astroturf field, which is an artificial or synthetic turf that is water-based. Before every game, and often during halftime, the maintenance crew at AstroTurf Field turns on two giant water hoses to soak down the field before the team competes on it.
Penn State coach Char Morett said watering the field helps athletes with their footing because the surface is spongy, meaning it will give and they won't get stuck in the turf. She also said the water helps prevent the ball from skipping, making all passes possible on the field.
"It sorta gives you the best of both worlds," Morett said. "You can do good, hard passes if that's what you're looking for, or you can pace the ball down the field because it's absorbing a little bit of water. This field allows you to do both because of the water."
The Nittany Lions play on the highest quality of Astroturf available to athletics, a Grade A turf or a regulation water-based turf. This is the only type of surface major field hockey events can be played on, such as the NCAA tournament and international matches.
Since the ball is usually on the ground in field hockey games, a smooth surface is required to keep the ball rolling. On a grass or field turf surface (which contains rubber pellets), the ball will get caught up in divots making the players come over the top of it when they try to make a pass. The smoothness of the turf accelerates the pace of the game as well.
"It's a lot faster," freshman midfielder Longstreth said. "Your stick moves a lot easier meaning you can hit balls quicker."
For the majority of the Penn State team, the first turf field they saw was at the collegiate level. Junior midfielder Amy Bonenberger said unless you played on a club team or your high school team made it to the playoffs, you played on a grass field. She said some fields she played on at the high school level were terrible, sometimes even in pastures full of weeds and dirt.
Morett said another advantage of playing on an Astroturf field is the team sees less injuries than they would playing on a more uneven surface. Since there are no divots, ankle rolls and torn ACLs are rarely seen.
However, the Lions said taking a fall is not as easy on turf as it is on grass. Bonenberger said when she or a teammate gets up from falling, it is not unlikely to find turf burns which are similar to rug burns. She said the burns sometimes sting, and the trainers have a special cream they put on the athletes' wounds before they bandage them up.
"Me and one other player have to wear knee pads on our knees because our turf burns keep reopening," Bonenberger said. "You can't play if you're bleeding, so we have to cover up our burns so we can still play."
The Lions aren't the only ones who are impressed with AstroTurf Field. Bob Hudzik, the Director of Outdoor Facilities, enjoys the little maintenance the field requires.
He said his department only needs to paint the field hockey lines once or twice a year, monitor the irrigation system and sweep off the field with a sweeper device on occasion. In its fourth year of use, AstroTurf Field is "as true as you get," Morett said. In the future, she hopes to see improvements in the landscaping around the stadium, but she knows that will come with time.
"I am just grateful Penn State gave us the finances to get this high quality of surface to use," Morett said. "I mean, pros come in and they go, 'This is a gorgeous field, this is a great field.' "
MENDHAM -- The West Morris Mendham High School Minutemen will kick off the fall season on a new artificial turf field, immediately followed by a walk-a-thon to help fund the field's remaining $275,000 balance.
The Time for Turf group already has raised more than $525,000 toward the field and is holding two events this season to pay off the balance. The artificial turf field was installed this summer by General Sports Venue.
The first fundraiser is a walk-a-thon after the home-opener on Sept. 19. Participants will walk up to 10 laps around the field, donating at least $100 each. In addition, a golf outing will be held on Sept. 29 at the Rockaway River Golf Club, and supporters also can purchase engraved pavers to be placed in a walkway at the high school stadium.
Time for Turf, an organization of parents of athletes from a variety of sports, approached the West Morris Regional Board of Education about the idea of a field more than a year ago, according to Kathleen Salerno, the group's president.
"Since the school was built in the 1970s, it has grown with the population, but the land has not," Salerno said. "With all the new sports, they were running out of field space."
The school formerly had to bus the lacrosse team to practice on nearby Black River Field in Chester and rented space at an indoor sports facility in Randolph when there was inclement weather.
According to West Morris Mendham High School Athletic Director Jim Baglin, the turf will be a true "game-changer."
"The benefits are two-fold for all our sports teams," he said. "They will be able to play on the field in bad weather, and it will also give them an advantage when playing an away game on turf. It is a lot different than playing on a grass field."
Baglin said a growing number of schools in the Minutemen's league have added artificial turf fields recently, including Chatham, Morristown, Parsippany Hills and Summit.
Artificial fields require little maintenance and can last 10 to 15 years under heavy play. General Sports Venue stands behind its product in assuring that all synthetic turf fibers in their products, including those that use polyethylene, polypropylene and nylon fibers, are lead-free.
Multi-use field
The field will be used for football, field hockey, soccer and band rehearsals -- for both high school and recreational sports -- throughout the year.
West Morris Regional Board of Education President Cristen Forrester said the district was thrilled to accept the gift.
"In this fiscal climate, it would not have been possible for the district to fund the field," Forrester said. "It's great to have parents, especially on the high school level, be involved in their kids' educational and school lives."
Time for Turf originally set out to raise funds for two artificial turf fields on a $1.3 million budget, but that plan was foiled by the field's 100-year-old flood drainage system. The maintenance work increased the project cost by almost a quarter of a million dollars, so it was scaled back to one field.
The owner of General Sports Venue, Michael Dennis, who has two children in the district, offered a "very competitive bid" and allowed the field to be built before it was fully paid for so the teams could begin practicing on it in the beginning of the season, Salerno said.
Teams began using the field this week, and the freshman football team played their first game on it against Dover on Friday.
REDSHIRT NATION The Old Dominion football team is practicing hard. After all, the kickoff to their next game is just over a year away.
by Eric Angevine
Old Dominion's football players enter the shiny new football offices through a set of glass doors. Each young man offers a polite greeting to the administrative personnel at the front desk as he passes through, like a tenant to a friendly doorman. The two women behind the desks play memory games, whispering to one another "He's a quarterback. Number 16, I think." As the room clears, one says aloud, "What we need is a roster with photos on it."
They laugh.
As football season starts up across the country, most teams are welcoming 20-25 new players to their rosters—the typical haul. At Old Dominion University, located in Norfolk, Virginia, the FCS start-up program is made up of nearly 100% Freshmen. The whole team. A few of the 17 walk-on players, culled from the student body in open tryouts, are older, but most are fresh from high school. None have ever taken a snap at the DI level.
The Monarchs won't debut their spread offense against their first outside opponent until September 5th of 2009, when they host Chowan. They'll schedule independently before officially joining the Colonial Athletic Association in 2011. This year, everyone's a redshirt.
"They're all just trying to survive," says head coach Bobby Wilder. "They don't know each other, they don't know the system, there's nobody to follow. So they're just figuring it out."
Wilder has an engaging presence and he speaks about his team with a mixture of brutal honesty of what they are now—the team has a website with the full 2009 schedule, a roster and videos of the beautiful facilities being built—and enthusiasm.
Wilder is a native New Englander, with a direct approach and unflappable demeanor dictated by his Maine upbringing. His leadership style is built upon his experiences up North, where he quarterbacked the Maine Black Bears to the championship of the now-defunct Yankee Conference, amassing over 4,000 passing yards by the time he graduated in 1987. He spent two years as a graduate assistant at Boston College before returning to his alma mater as quarterbacks coach. Wilder spent the next seventeen years at Maine (now a part of the CAA's North Division), rising to the position of associate head coach before the Monarchs came calling.
"We looked at some more experienced coaches with bigger names," admits ODU athletic director Dr. Jim Jarrett, "but my theory is that every successful head coach started as a player, then an assistant, and moved up. Somebody has to give them that chance."
Wilder's unrelenting positivity and outgoing nature may have served him as well as anything on his resume. Hired in February, 2007, he spent his first year coaching as both politician and salesman, convincing residents of this seaside city of 2 million that he was the right man for the job, and then trying to convince their sons to come play for him.
Norfolk, home of the Navy's U.S. Fleet Headquarters, is part of the vaunted Hampton Roads recruiting grounds, which annually turns out gifted Division One players in all sports. Allen Iverson and Michael Vick are the big names, but the local talent pool also produced Plaxico Burress, Alonzo Mourning, and MLB's David Wright, amongst many others.
"This area, for recruiting, is really tremendous; a nationally known area," says Wilder. "At first, I wasn't really interested in applying for a job at a start-up program, but that really piqued my interest." The school's all-in commitment to building a competitive program helped seal the deal. Old Dominion has been without a football program since 1940, when the school was still a two-year branch campus of nearby William & Mary College. Debt and lack of interest killed the original program in its infancy, leaving venerable Foreman Field to host mostly high school games for the next several decades.
As interest grew, money was still hard to come by, and an attempt to revive football in 1987 failed. According to Dr. Jarrett, it was former president Roseanne Runte who finally solved the puzzle. "Dr. Runte pushed hard for this," he says. "She got student leaders involved, and they put through a student fee package."
With the student body behind the proposal, the university's Board of Visitors had no problem convincing other donors to contribute to what eventually became an $8 million football endowment fund. In addition, Foreman Field is undergoing a $24.8 million facilities upgrade, and the $17 million Powhatan Sports Center was built from scratch. The center houses the football offices and two fifty-yard practice fields, as well as facilities and offices for field hockey and lacrosse.
The commitment to all sports ensures that Wilder and his lion cubs won't get a free pass at Old Dominion. Monarch teams have won multiple national championships in women's basketball, sailing, tennis and field hockey. ODU's Anne Donovan earned a gold medal coaching the U.S. women's basketball team in Beijing, and alum Anna Tunnicliffe won her sailing race to earn more gold. Men's basketball is routinely atop the CAA standings. Dr. Jarrett says "We expect our teams to compete for championships and national rankings. We won't take money from established, successful sports to support football."
ODU's roots in the area are an immediate boon to recruting if a football history isn't. Defensive End Andrew Turner grew up just down the road. "I'm from Virginia Beach, and all of the coaching staff at my high school went to ODU," he says. "Everyone really stressed that we could make history and do something special, and I was really excited about that."
That pioneering spirit will have to hold the team for some time. If this were a movie, the next year would play out in an inspirational thirty-second montage of weightlifting, sprints, studying and scrimmaging. But the coaching staff, which already includes eight position coaches plus a strength coach, and their 82 new charges will have to live every minute of it in real time. In an attempt to stave off monotony, coach Wilder has planned his schedule meticulously, as though the current season was the real deal. In addition to regular practices and academic study groups, there will be team-building functions and community events in which the Monarchs will get to know each other and their fans. There will also be simulated game weeks. "We project them into next year," says Wilder. "We choose an opponent, do scouting reports, practice for that team, and then kick off an intra-squad scrimmage at 6pm on Saturday night. It's the whole routine." As the team takes to the practice field on an overcast day a week into the football season they all see unfolding on TV, all of that is still ahead of them. The team only has thirteen offensive plays right now, a small part of what will be a full spread offense by this time next year. They have just one defensive set down.
Special teams are limited to practicing punts and PATs in this first week of classes. Wilder watches everything closely, rarely raising his voice. He gives clear directions and claps encouragement. After an hour of drills and calesthenics with position coaches, the players run to the fifty yard line and group around the head coach. He says a few words, they rise together and huddle, right hands raised as they bark "O! D! U!"
In celebration of the 2008 NFL Kickoff, the NFL will be hosting a two day football festival in Central Park. In partnership with Nike, Nike Let Me Play, and NYC & Company, the NFL PLAY 60 Football Festival will showcase the NFL’s commitment to growing the game of football and to helping kids get active and healthy. The festival will bring 1,000 diverse middle and high school youth to Central Park to participate in high school football clinics, NFL FLAG football instructional clinics and other health and fitness activities.
The festival was held Wednesday September 3rd and Thursday September 4th. Youthwere invited in groups of 100 (boys and girls) from all five NYC boroughs to participate in hour long sessions. Current and former NFL players and Nike athletes will participate and lead each session. They will also hold an educational Q and A session at the end of each hour, where they will talk to youth about their football experiences, the importance of in-school and after school activity and developing life long healthy habits. They will also discuss the importance of empowering each other to effect change on their current school environment, and provide tips and guidance on how youth can make their school the most active and healthy.
AstroTurf has taken a leadership role on the issue of lead compliance and user safety in California, just as it has over the past several months after similar concerns were raised in New Jersey. The safety of the synthetic sports turf products produced by AstroTurf is the company's foremost concern. AstroTurf has demonstrated its industry leadership by proactively developing new products that are below the most stringent standards for lead in consumer products. The Ironbound Stadium field in Newark, where questions about the material composition of the turf originated, has been replaced by a new, lead compliant AstroTurf product. On July 30, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission confirmed that AstroTurf products are safe for children, a position taken by AstroTurf and supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.
California has some of the strictest compliance standards in the U.S., and AstroTurf has worked hard to earn the confidence of the Attorney General's office and the California Center for Environmental Health. AstroTurf is committed to working with the Attorney General's office and the CEH on the issue of compliance. The lawsuit filed by the State is a procedural step toward resolving the issue. AstroTurf appreciates the acknowledgement of its good faith efforts by the CEH and looks forward to providing the citizens of California with safe, high quality synthetic sports fields for many years to come.
The Bills, off to their best start since 1992, keep the Rams winless. St. Louis Coach Scott Linehan benches quarterback Marc Bulger in favor of 38-year-old Trent Green.
