St. Louis CITY SC won’t take the field again at CITYPARK until May 11. When it does, the team will find an entirely new pitch waiting for it.
Work began Tuesday on a resodding project that will see a new playing surface installed at the stadium by the end of this week. The original Bermuda grass field would have turned 2 years old next month, approximately the end of its lifecycle. With the team off this weekend and on the road next week, CITY director of stadium grounds Josh McPherson believes there’s no better time than now to refresh arguably the most important feature inside CITYPARK.
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“A three-week break is very rare,” McPherson says. “Would waiting another month possibly be better? Maybe. Could we have gotten another month out of this? Probably. But we wanted to take advantage of the fact that we can change it out and not have to play on it instantly.”
Although CITY players enjoyed a scheduled day off on Tuesday, the stadium was abuzz with activity. Workers with Bush Turf pulled up rows of grass to expose the underlying dirt surface. The remnants of the old field will soon make its way to St. Louis Composting. The new sod, a custom-grown Northbridge Bermudagrass produced by Carolina Green Corp. at its farm in North Carolina, will be installed on Thursday.
Before that happens, workers will complete a laser-grading project on Wednesday that will ensure that the playing surface is completely flat before the new field is laid on top of the dirt.
“If we needed, we could play on it on Friday,” McPherson says. “But we get the next two weeks to get it standing up right, getting it so the ball rolls really well.”
McPherson says Carolina Green Corp. is an industry leader that supplies sod to stadiums across the country. The sod-on-plastic technology allows for a quick replacement process, which is especially handy for NFL teams that replace portions of their sod several times during a season. Carolina Green Corp. also grows the sod used by Sporting Kansas City, as well as the Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Bears, Baltimore Ravens, and Washington Commanders, among others.
Looking at the torn-up field on Tuesday morning, McPherson said he was eager to get the new batch of grass installed and start perfecting the pitch.
“Having a leadership group that supports doing things like this is a really fun part of working here,” he says. “It’s really exciting.”
