New artificial turf field will greet Mendham H.S. Minutemen this football season

Fundraiser seeks $275K to pay off Mendham field

By Meghan Van Dyk
Daily Record

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.

ODU Football featured in ESPN the Magazine

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!"

Kickoff is only 372 days away.

GSV/AstroTurf statement regarding California Proposition 65

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.

GSV and AstroTurf featured in INC Magazine

Jon Pritchett's Dream of Reviving AstroTurf Became a PR Nightmare
Should he go all out to save the brand?

By: Andrew Park
Published September 2008


In the fall of 2007, New Jersey state health officials made a troubling discovery: A playing field at a Newark park contained extremely high levels of lead. They assumed the contamination was coming from the abandoned scrap-metal yard next door. But the problem turned out to be deep in the fibers of the artificial turf covering the field. When the news broke the following spring, it set off a nationwide scare, and for tiny GeneralSports Venue, a public-relations nightmare.

The company, a five-year-old artificial-turf supplier with 42 employees, wasn't at fault. But the brand name it had just adopted was. GeneralSports had acquired an exclusive license on the name AstroTurf -- the same one used by the now-defunct company that had manufactured the Newark field almost a decade earlier -- and had spent millions of dollars to resurrect it. But now that familiar name was at the center of fears about the safety of playing fields, and GSV's big investment was suddenly at risk. "I'm a parent, and if you think about children, turf, and lead, it's pretty scary," says Jon Pritchett, the company's co-founder and CEO. "Not a whole lot more needs to be said."

Just how much more to say was, in fact, the critical question. On the one hand, it's rarely advisable for a company to keep quiet in a crisis. But no one was claiming that GSV was responsible for products made long ago by another company. So, anything it said risked drawing even more negative attention. Yet the AstroTurf name, which to many is synonymous with all brands of artificial turf, was being invoked in every story about the lead scare, often erroneously. Could GSV really stay silent while AstroTurf was trashed?

The granddaddy of fake grass was invented by Monsanto and was a household name from the moment it was rolled out in the Houston Astrodome, in 1966. The brilliant-green carpet became the surface of choice for America's new climate-controlled domed stadiums. But by the 1990s, AstroTurf started to fade. Athletes complained of injuries suffered on the abrasive, unforgiving nylon, and a softer polyethylene turf marketed by rival brand FieldTurf became the industry standard. AstroTurf changed hands twice, and in 2004, its owner filed for bankruptcy.

At the time, GSV was a bit player in the artificial-turf business. The company was formed when Pritchett, a sports marketing executive who worked in the University of South Carolina's athletic department while getting his M.B.A., hooked up with Michigan sports and entertainment entrepreneur Andy Appleby. With a business plan based on consolidating a fragmented but growing market, they raised $3 million from investors, including a New Jersey telecom executive named Michael Dennis.

But the company's brand struggled to gain traction against FieldTurf. In 2006, sensing that AstroTurf's worldwide name recognition could vault it into contention, GSV negotiated a license lasting 50 years with the brand's owner, Textile Management Associates, which continued to handle manufacturing.

Pritchett quickly set about bringing AstroTurf back, starting with an announcement in December 2006 at the ESPN Zone restaurant in New York City's Times Square. GSV rebranded its existing product line and hired a national sales force. An ad campaign emphasized the storied brand's place in sports history and its new, cushier, player-friendly surface. Pritchett even hired football great Archie Manning, father of NFL stars Peyton and Eli, to be AstroTurf's brand ambassador. By the end of 2007, sales were up 67 percent, to $25 million, and were projected to hit $40 million in 2008. With 10 percent of the market, up from less than 2 percent in 2006, AstroTurf now trailed only FieldTurf.

Then, during a March 12 staff conference call, Pritchett was notified about the lead discovery in Newark. GSV believed its current products were safe, but it couldn't vouch for AstroTurf installed by others years earlier. GSV began gathering information from industry experts as well as its own suppliers, trying to understand the depth of the problem.

But AstroTurf's troubles grew. On April 14, the New Jersey state health department announced it had tested 12 more artificial-turf fields for lead and found two with levels eight to 10 times what it considered safe. As in Newark, both were nylon fields, and both were AstroTurf. The state's top epidemiologists called for a federal investigation into the safety of artificial turf.

Media across the country picked up the story of New Jersey's toxic turf, with television footage showing workers wearing protective green suits as they tore up the field in Newark. Elsewhere, fields were padlocked, events were canceled, and school board hearings were held. "Our thinking was this could last long enough that it could do a lot of damage," says Pritchett.

GSV spent the next seven days in near-constant deliberations. At the table were Pritchett's management team and legal counsel, AstroTurf's manufacturer, and GSV's PR firm. Initially GSV had let the Synthetic Turf Council, the industry's trade association, respond publicly. But Pritchett knew that the council couldn't be expected to offer a vigorous defense of a single member's brand. For that, the company would have to step out on its own.

Yet doing so risked heightening the unwanted scrutiny on AstroTurf and making the brand an even bigger lightning rod. GSV wasn't responsible and could be forgiven for keeping quiet, it was pointed out. And though some GSV executives wanted to come out swinging, Michael Dennis argued for taking the high road. "We all took it personally," says sales and marketing manager Philip Primato. "We had put so much into building this brand back that we were not going to let something like this stop us."

The Decision Pritchett opted for going on the offensive. GSV spent the next 10 days planning a major press conference for May 5, at which four company-retained scientists would present their findings. The venue, the New York Public Library for Science, Industry and Business, was chosen to reinforce the scientists' message. The team worked hard to distill the data to a form the public could easily absorb. No one disputed the source of the lead: the pigment that gives artificial turf its green-grass color and that the industry has been trying to eliminate. But GSV's panel argued that, even in older turf, the lead compound was encapsulated before being extruded into the fibers. So it would be impossible for lead to leach from an AstroTurf-covered field. Even if those fibers were somehow ingested, the amount of lead they contained was much too small to be dangerous. A 100-pound child would have to eat 23 pounds of AstroTurf before it would pose a health hazard, they said.

The press conference attracted reporters from more than two dozen media outlets, including USA Today. That night, sitting with Pritchett on the patio of Dennis's home in Chester, New Jersey, Primato pulled up the newspaper's website on his laptop. The front page of the sports section featured a story about the press conference and a photo showing the 23 pounds of AstroTurf GSV had dumped in front of the podium for effect. For at least a moment, the company had seized control of the spotlight.

In the following days, press reports were less alarmist. Pritchett says he believes GSV's willingness to confront the issue head on defused the PR fallout. And when the final results from the state's tests on the three fields with high lead levels came out, in early June, the findings seemed to support GSV's position, showing an even smaller threat of lead exposure than GSV's estimates.

GSV was even chosen to replace the field in Newark that had started it all, after Dennis lobbied for the contract. "Our reputation was on the line," says Dennis, now the company's majority shareholder. "I was not going to let it be replaced with a competitive product." Still, the fight isn't over. In June, the Centers for Disease Control issued a health advisory, urging caution before letting children play on artificial turf. Earlier, the Consumer Product Safety Commission began a separate investigation.

Pritchett maintains that by taking the initiative in the lead scare, GSV positioned itself as more than just the caretaker of an aging brand. "It tested us," he says. "I wouldn't want to do it again, but I do think it helped us."

INC Magazine Website

Video from New York City Press Conference

GSV's Response to a FieldTurf Statement attempting to discredit a Michigan State University Study

Despite not having read the scientific study produced by Michigan State University’s Orthopaedic Biomechanics Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. Roger Haut and Dr. John Powell, which was recently presented at the North American Conference on Bio Mechanics, FieldTurf attempted to discredit the work. It is worth noting that this research was not only overseen by some of sports medicine’s most experienced and respected academicians, it was also funded by the NFL Charities Foundation…not by GSV or AstroTurf.

FieldTurf claims that this study is "junk science". An opinion that they are certainly free to express, but that is absurdly wrong and wholly disrespectful to both the highly accredited research team and the NFL itself.

While the research was narrowly focused and did not attempt to answer broad questions, it certainly adds to the body of knowledge in the continuing pursuit for more understanding of the interface between athletes, shoes and synthetic turf. The study conducted by Michigan State University was under the watchful eye of Dr. John Powell, who has been a leading researcher and medical advisor for the National Football League, working with the league in the study of injury rates since 1980.

Dr. Powell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and directs the graduate athletic training educational and research program. Dr. Powell was instrumental in researching and guiding the preparatory phase of the undergraduate educational athletic training program development at Michigan State University. Dr. Powell is currently involved in extensive research in the area of injury prevention, sports injury epidemiology and the biomechanics of lower extremity injuries.

Dr. Powell is a consistent professional reviewer for the Journal of Athletic Training, American Journal of Sports Medicine and Medicine and Science in Sport. He was named the 2000 recipient of the William G. Clancy Jr. M.D. Medal for Distinguished Athletic Training Research by the NATA Research and Education Foundation. Dr. Powell was named a 2005 recipient of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) Most Distinguished Athletic Trainer Award. In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow in the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education. Dr. Powell earned his Bachelors of Science Degree from Michigan State University, his Masters of Science degree from Indiana University, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Penn State University.

FieldTurf also claims that the independent third party study was funded by GSV. While a clever attempt to deflect attention from the results of the study, the claim is completely false. In fact, this study was funded by the NFL Charities Foundation.

Each year, the NFL Charities Foundation awards $1.5 million in sports-related medical research grants that target sports injury prevention, injury treatment, and other related research that affects the health and performance of athletes. GSV and AstroTurf did not fund the research nor were they allowed to have any input into the criteria, methodology, assumptions or conclusions. We did contribute materials and installation of some of the turf systems that were analyzed in order to learn more about how our newer products are performing in this important area. This contribution did not affect or impact any opinions reflected in the MSU study.

The National Football League is committed to supporting research and enhancing the body of scientific knowledge that will benefit all those involved in competitive sports and recreational athletic activities. Funding is available for non-profit educational and research institutions only. For-profit enterprises are not eligible to apply in this grant category. Over the past four years, the NFL Charities Foundation has awarded grants for 60 different scientific studies and research opportunities. To learn more, visit the NFL Charities Foundation website

Despite claims by FieldTurf, the Michigan State University abstract was peer reviewed and the formal study is currently under peer review for publication in the Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology, which aims to become the publication of choice for authors to disseminate, original research findings related to the development or application of technology in sports.

Finally, FieldTurf claims that the surfaces tested were "newly installed sections of turf". The FieldTurf system tested was a 5–year-old game field. The AstroPlay field tested was a 6-year-old practice field. The GameDay Grass XPe and 3D systems tested were a year-old and serve as a practice field for the football team. The natural grass system tested was the Spartan Stadium field at MSU, which was named the Stadium Field of-the-Year by the STMA in 2006.

In conclusion, the opinions set forth in the Michigan State University study are a culmination of extensive, scientific-based research conducted by highly credentialed academicians who were not influenced by others. Michigan State University and the NFL have done many such research projects in the past that contribute to the body of knowledge in the specific area of orthopedic biomechanics. GSV and AstroTurf will continue to pursue answers and questions in a quest for improving performance and safety of synthetic turf systems. Whether that research is through third parties, the academic community, strategic allies, supply chain partners or self-performed, we are in pursuit of the data and information that leads to improving products for our customers. That pursuit does not stop with biomechanics. We will also continue our pursuit of improvements in integrated manufacturing, fabrication, installation, financing, environmental stewardship and customer service. We reject the idea that only one large company has the answers to these and many questions that need to be answered. We also reject the supposition that such company’s product is the best simply because they say it is or because it was the best alternative ten years ago.

Turf Installation Nearing Final Stages As Monarchs Prepare For Practice

Aug. 12, 2008

Norfolk, Va. – With two days remaining before the Old Dominion University football team hits the field for its first practice, workers are nearing completion on the two new AstroTurf GameDay Grass 3D fields that the Monarchs will use for practice. One field will be a regulation size 100 yards and the other will be a shortened 60-yard field.

The GameDay Grass 3D fields were supplied by GeneralSports Venue (GSV), a certified minority business enterprise and the exclusive U.S. marketer of AstroTurf-branded products. GameDay Grass 3D is one of the most advanced synthetic turf products, featuring best-in-class performance and safety benefits, and characteristics that closely mimic the look and feel of natural grass.

A recent study released by Michigan State University and funded by the NFL Charities Foundation revealed that GameDay Grass 3D most closely replicated natural grass in a comparison of 16 types of synthetic and natural sports turf, based on the torque, force and friction generated by cleated athletic shoes. The study evaluated the potential impact of football playing surfaces on lower extremity injuries caused by excessive torque, or the rotational friction produced when cleated shoes dig into the field. The GameDay Grass 3D system with all-rubber infill had the lowest average torque of all synthetic turf systems tested, second only to natural grass.

To assist in preventing injury, GameDay Grass 3D utilizes a proprietary technology called RootZone, a nylon thatch layer at the base coupled with a monofilament polyethylene long fiber, that replicates natural grass. The density of the RootZone, providing stability, cushion and consistent performance, means that less granulated infill is required, reducing the problems related to infill migration and “fly-out”. The nylon-polyethylene hybrid construction also serves to increases durability and overall system performance.

The installed base for GSV is now well over 150 fields including projects for the likes of Florida State, the University of Texas, the Washington Redskins and the Buffalo Bills.

ODU Football on the web