SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/318924
26 SportsTurf | June 2014 www.sportsturfonline.com F a c i l i t y & O p e r a t i o n s | B y P a t r i c k D . T here are a lot of reasons to love a great stadium—your favorite team plays there, the seats have great views, it's the home of fond memories. Maybe it just has the best sushi in town. But when you run a sports venue, it's the less glamorous issues that keep you up at night: like how to limit the facility's liability. Because if you don't keep your facility safe and your liability limited, the results can be catastrophic. WaiT, WhaT's liabiliTy? Put simply, liability is the risk that your organization will be sued for injuries (or property damage) that occur at your facility. You can never entirely eliminate liability, because some disasters simply aren't foreseeable. But if you make your facility as safe as possible, obtain waivers, and purchase liability insurance, you can dramatically reduce your risk. safeTy Operating a safe sporting facility is the first step in limiting your liability. The primary reason why prioritizing safety will limit liability is that in order for players or visitors to win a lawsuit against the facility, they must first show that they or their property were harmed. If there's no injury, there's no basis for a lawsuit. Even if something goes wrong and someone is injured, facilities that have done everything in their power to ensure that visitors are safe will be exposed to less liability. That's because venues can generally be held liable for injuries that result from situations that they knew or should have known were dangerous. If you know something is dangerous, you are obligated to mitigate that risk. On The field Take, for example, a football field. If you place a wall too close to the end zone, it's reasonable to expect that a player may accidently run in to it and injure himself. When the wall is already in place, it can be tempting to ignore the potential risk. But if a player does get hurt, he will have a strong claim that you were negligent because you should have anticipated how dangerous the wall was. It's far better to be cautious and attempt to mitigate the risk by padding (or even removing) the wall. Another common source of injuries in facilities that cater to children, students, and community athletes are unanchored soccer goals. Weighting the bases of goals may be enough to keep them in place during most games. But when the game is over, and people are using the field for everything from Frisbee games to tailgates, unsecured goals can become hazardous. Over the last 50 years, close 100 people have been killed or seriously injured as a result of soccer goals falling on them. Many of those people may have been reckless—maybe they were hanging from the goal or attempting to climb it. But as a facility manager, you are expected to anticipate that people will do risky things, and you're expected to take precautions to limit the possibility that they will be injured. Finally, it's important to remember that you need to be just as conscien- tious about maintaining safe practice facilities as you are about the primary field or court. Injuries that happen during practices (and the resulting suits) can be just as catastrophic as those that happen during the big game. and Off The field Facilities also need to minimize the risk to spectators. Visitors often sue for injuries wholly unrelated to the main sporting event, from slip-and-fall Limiting liability for your sports facility Facility & Operations | By Patrick D. McGuiness Image ©istockphoto.com/iqoncept.