14 SportsTurf | April 2014 www.sportsturfonline.com
I
n an otherwise empty MetLife Stadium near
midnight on February 2, several t-shirt wearing, hel-
metless Seattle Seahawks players and their loved ones
raced joyfully along the sidelines, reveling in the
team's 43–8 demolition of the Denver Broncos in
Super Bowl XLVIII.
The celebratory confetti dotting the green field would
have looked just an hour earlier like unseemly dandruff
needing to be promptly scraped off for marring the play-
ing surface's otherwise handsome mien.
For the approximately 30 groundskeepers who'd lov-
ingly tended the pasture over the previous weeks, its pris-
tine condition for the game was a source of pride—all the
more so, given concerns over this being the first Super
Bowl scheduled for an outdoor, cold-weather venue.
But the unseasonably warm day that produced an
evening temperature of 49 degrees at kickoff did little to
diminish the crew's satisfaction at having readied the turf
for winter's worst.
Among most groundskeepers' first tasks upon arriving
in New Jersey in mid-January was unloading snow plows
and snow-blowing and -clearing machines from several
tractor-trailers packed with equipment to prepare the sta-
dium's field, as well as those at the Jets' and Giants' prac-
SUPER BOWL
GROUNDSKEEPING
CREW BEATS OUTDOOR
CONDITIONS
Facility
& Operations
|
By Hillel Kuttler
Snow at
MetLife Stadium
in East Rutherford,
NJ before the
Super Bowl.
