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: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/753045
8 SportsTurf | December 2016 www.sportsturfonline.com FIELD SCIENCE STEPPING UP FOR KIDS AND ATHLETIC FIELDS Providing safe playing surfaces is only part of the mission for Project EverGreen's "Healthy Turf. Healthy Kids." That's when non-profit Project EverGreen and its "Healthy Turf. Healthy Kids."™ Initiative stepped in. With the help of Hazlet-based Performance Nutrition, professional landscape contractors and suppliers, Project EverGreen secured more than $20,000 in donations of expertise, materials and services to improve the playability and safety of 100,000 sq. ft. of playing surface. The project includes aeration, reseeding, and topsoil applications to build up the unsafe runoff low spots to spec, and applications of organic soil amendments and fertilizers. The field provides upward of nearly 1,000 Hazlet Youth Athletic League football players, cheer squads, their parents, and coaches with a greener, safer, sustainable place to play. The field renovation will also provide significant environ- mental, economic and healthy lifestyle benefits to Hazlet's children and their community. "Healthy Turf. Healthy Kids." is a nationwide initiative to renovate and revitalize athletic and recreational green spaces in urban areas to ensure children have access to safe and healthy green spaces on which to play and exercise. Since the program's inception in 2015, renovation projects covering more than 700,000 sq. ft. of athletic and recreational green spaces have been completed across the country including Atlanta; Houston, San Antonio, Round Rock and Ft. Worth, TX; North Chicago, IL; Cleveland; Durham and Greensboro, NC; Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, East Harlem, NY, and the previously mentioned Hazlet, NJ. Numerous studies have shown that managed parks, sports fields and recreational playing areas provide the following environmental, health and lifestyle benefits: ■ Lawns and sports fields are 30 degrees cooler than asphalt; and 14 degrees cooler than bare soil. ■ Parks and sports fields are gathering places that create close-knit communities, improve well being and increase safety. ■ Managed grass playing surfaces help minimize concussions and sports related injuries as well as reduce quantities or populations of mosquitoes, ticks and stinging insects. ■ Physically active young people are more confident and demonstrate higher academic performance at school. Beyond Project EverGreen's mission and its programs, as well as the many other industry initiatives and educational resources, the focus of this movement is to help raise the so- cial consciousness about creating a healthier, greener, cooler earth for future generations. "There's only one earth; we get only one chance at this," says Dan Carrothers, president of the board of directors for Project EverGreen. "We're confident that as an industry, partnering with consumers, we can create an earth that is greener and cooler; and assure that we're leaving an earth to ■ BY CINDY CODE W ith more than a million and half acres of parkland in the United States one would assume that children would be able to easily find a safe outdoor place to play and compete. Unfortunately, assumptions can be misleading. Changing lifestyle choices, economic constraints, shifts in population bases, crime and the lack of interest have made the athletic and recreational fields that were enjoyed by the parents of today when they were growing up outdated, unsafe and in dire need of renovation. Take for example the playing surface at Steve Patterson Field in Hazlet, NJ. The field, home to the Hazlet Youth Athletic League, had been closed for nearly a decade, and an excep- tionally hot summer and fall, punctuated by recurring extreme rainfall, immediately left dead turfgrass and erosion damage that made playing surface unsafe and threatened to extend the field's closure.