Husky Field took on a brand new look last week as a crew from FieldTurf rolled out brand new artificial turf on a compacted gravel surface to create an all-weather football and soccer field.
“We’re on schedule,” said Football Coach Dustin Nichol Monday. Nichol has almost single-handedly engineered the transformation of the field from natural turf to FieldTurf’s XT-65, a 2½-inch tall synthetic turf.
A second crew was working Monday morning on painting lines, numbers and a center logo on the field, a process that Nichol said would likely take most of this week. He said crews have had to work extra hard because of a glut of artificial-turf fields going in around the state, including one at West Albany.
“A lot of fields are going in,” he said. “We’ve got skeleton crews and they’re having to work long hours to get things done. Some of the other fields weren’t on schedule and that’s impacted us.”
Once the lettering and lines are done, the artificial-turf carpet will be covered and raked with a million pounds of infill made of silica and rubber pellets, which will provide a playing surface between the strands of turf.
Following completion of the turf, the track will be resurfaced. The entire project, priced at approximately $1.4 million, is being funded through donations, school district funds that were set aside for track and field maintenance, and a lot of in-kind and volunteer labor that accounted for the removal of some 6,500 cubic yards of topsoil and its replacement with gravel, a drainage system and underlayment before the carpet went down.
The field will be inaugurated by a soccer game on Sept. 1, and the first home football game, against Crook County, is scheduled for Sept. 4.