AstroTurf's Michael Dennis on Fox News Channel

Check out AstroTurf's Michael Dennis was featured on Your World with Neil Cavuto on Fox News Channel this afternoon.

St. Louis Rams Select State-of-the-Art System from AstroTurf(R) for Practice Field

First NFL team to install an advanced synthetic turf system from AstroTurf®

AstroTurf brings its latest innovation directly to the National Football League. The announcement came today that the St. Louis Rams have selected AstroTurf® for a new synthetic practice field at Rams Park. The joint construction effort between GSV, AstroTurf and Munie Greencare Professionals will begin immediately and the field will be ready in time for the start of training camp in late July.

"After looking at all the different synthetic turf providers available, we felt AstroTurf was the best choice for us," said Kevin Demoff, St. Louis Rams Executive VP of Football Operations/Chief Operating Officer. "AstroTurf’s commitment to player performance and safety was a major factor in our decision. We can’t wait to get going on our new field."

The latest infilled systems from AstroTurf were designed and refined to meet the rigorous demands and performance characteristics required by the NFL. "This is a huge honor to have our state-of-the-art AstroTurf system validated by the Rams and the National Football League," said GSV Chairman Michael Dennis. "To have the greatest athletes in the world train on our system is a testament to years of testing, research and development that have gone into restoring AstroTurf as a leader in the industry. We are grateful to have been selected and proud to debut this fabulous technology with the Rams and the NFL."

The St. Louis Rams enter the 2009 season with a renewed sense of optimism under the leadership of new head coach Steve Spagnuolo, the former New York Giants Defensive Coordinator. "The Rams new AstroTurf practice field will be one of the finest in the NFL," said Bryan Peeples, President of AstroTurf. "Everyone at GSV and AstroTurf are honored to have been selected and look forward to being a part of the St. Louis Rams for many years to come."

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.

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