Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

L.C. Greenwood wrote:The Pacific Northwest has been using fieldturf for high school and college football for roughly 15 years now.

For sure. Were at the forefront at all levels, either as one of the first or the first to switch to or go with fieldturf at the various levels of football. I didn't like it because I was excited that the Seahawks were finally going to have an outdoor stadium with natural grass (they were supposed to!) then that didn't happen. Before Seahawks Stadium the colleges had switched and when I was a Jr. in HS in 2000 was when I first heard of fieldturf for HS football in WA, but it wasn't somewhere we played. All our regular season games were always on grass (majority in the rain and a lot in the mud) then the state playoffs we would play on astroturf. By the mid-2000's most of the stadiums I had played at had switched from grass to fieldturf and the astroturf ones had switched to fieldturf as well. My high school switched to fieldturf in 2004 and we had always been grass (mud after the first month of the season, ha). Wish they still played on grass. The other thing is the youth football league I played in -and it's mostly the same around the state- we used the HS stadiums for our games. It's still the same now, but now 7-year old kids are playing football on fieldturf, and playing on it the next year and every year after through HS, game after game. It can't be good for knees, joints, etc.

Astroturf was even more popular in the college ranks. I think by the early 1970s the entire Southwest Confernece played on an artificial surface. Out of the top programs in the country, I can only name a handful (USC, ND, UCLA, Penn State, LSU, Ole Miss and Georgia), that played on grass.

I thought this was a great quote about Astroturf from the 10/5/70 issue of SI by Auburn coach Shag Jordan “ A bunch of sadists invented it and promulgated it, and people in the press box and others who promote it should be forced to play on it. “

Apbaball wrote: people... who promote it should be forced to play on it. “

Exactly.