AstroTurf looks to plant new seeds
RALEIGH, N.C. – For Jon Pritchett, reviving AstroTurf has been like raising the dead.
The brand name synonymous with artificial grass fell on hard times in 2004, when the company that made a surface that added “turf toe” and “rug burn” to the sports lexicon went bankrupt. It was even declared DOA on a headstone in an advertisement run by industry leader FieldTurf.
Pritchett is trying to bring AstroTurf back to life.
“Everything you know about AstroTurf is history,” he said.
His company, GeneralSports Venue LLC, acquired the North American rights to the AstroTurf name late last year. His challenge is to level the playing field in the sports-surfacing game, turning “AstroTurf” from a reviled brand to one that represents the new technology of artificial playing surfaces that look, play and feel like real grass.
“There’s a legacy there. There’s a legacy of being the original innovator, creating the category,” Pritchett said. “There’s also a negative association in that because it’s such a strong name and the technology didn’t change for so long.”
The artificial surfaces in present-day stadiums look and feel much more like grass than the original AstroTurf, an abrasive, bright green knitted nylon carpet that was created near Raleigh in the 1960s and got its name following its debut in the Astrodome in 1966.
For more than 30 years, it was a tolerated staple of major league baseball and the NFL, saving teams money in landscaping while ruining players’ knees and ankles.
Except in field hockey, that turf technology is nearly extinct today – the last old-school AstroTurf surfaces in pro baseball and football were ripped up in 2005. Idaho was the only Division I-A football team with it last season, and the Vandals plan to remove it this summer.
The new style of fake turf is based on a sea of polyethylene fibers that simulate blades of grass, surrounded by infills largely composed of rubber granules, creating a soft cushion that behaves like a grass field. The system was developed by Canada-based FieldTurf Tarkett Inc., which holds about a dozen patents for installation techniques and specific field recipes.
Installing an average football field typically costs $300,000 to $500,000, and doesn’t include preparing the field’s base. All three major league baseball teams with artificial turf have FieldTurf surfaces, as do nine of the 13 NFL teams with a synthetic field. FieldTurf installed nearly two-thirds of the fields for the 63 Division I-A college football teams that will play on artificial surfaces this season.
FieldTurf chief executive John Gilman said his company’s revenues should exceed $200 million this year, a fourfold increase from 2000.
“Being No. 1 just means that you’ve got all the little guys … taking potshots at you, and trying to get the ear of a client or put some false information in their ear,” Gilman said. “The best showcase you have is the field you put in the ground. … It served us well when we were a David and fighting the AstroTurfs of the world, and hopefully it will continue to serve us well over the next 10, 15 years.”
Its main competitors include Sportexe, SprinTurf – and the new AstroTurf. The products are similar, with subtle differences that range from the length and composition of the fake blades to the amount of infill, and whether the infill is composed of rubber, sand or a mix of both. One of the options offered by AstroTurf is a factory-installed anti-bacterial coating designed to help prevent staph infections.
“A lot of these products are performing very similarly as far as heat, as far as athlete performance, hardness, traction, abrasion,” said turf expert Andy McNitt, an associate professor of soil science and turfgrass at Penn State. “There are no great big differences among them. There are minor differences, but there aren’t big major ones.”
Before the previous manufacturer of AstroTurf, Texas-based Southwest Recreational Industries Inc., filed for bankruptcy and went out of business in 2004, it had developed a similar surface called AstroPlay. It was so similar that FieldTurf unsuccessfully sued for patent infringement; a confidential settlement later was reached.
AstroPlay is now one of AstroTurf’s products, called Gameday Grass, and is made by Textile Management Associates, a Dalton, Ga.-based company that partnered with GeneralSports to market and sell the product. GeneralSports signed Archie Manning as a spokesman for AstroTurf and relaunched the brand in December.
“It’s kind of what we call `Operation: Takeback,”’ Pritchett said. “It’s a ground war of hand-to-hand combat, face-to-face sales people, and we expect it will take a period of time to gain back that ground.”