Tag: artificial turf

soccer

The tough turf questions to ask after the WNT cancellation

Posted on by Beau Dure

The U.S. women’s national team will not play Trinidad & Tobago today. The cancellation is the stunning but fair conclusion to yesterday’s news that Megan Rapinoe tore her ACL in training and the team was less than pleased with the conditions of Aloha Stadium’s artificial turf.

The first question: How could this happen?

Easy answer: U.S. Soccer dropped the ball and failed to check out the field. But it’s a little more complex than that.

This field hasn’t been sitting idle for months. Hawaii’s football team just finished a full season on it. The NFL’s Pro Bowl will be played there in a couple of months.

So how can a field be suitable for large people making sharp cuts and tackling each other but not suitable for a soccer game?

KHON says turf was added to the playing area in an effort to make it wider than a football field, and they cite Hope Solo’s tweet lifting a seam in the turf. But the Honolulu Star-Advertiser cites coach Jill Ellis in saying the field is still “very narrow.”

From overhead photos, it looks like the stadium has little space to add width. This isn’t one of these new NFL stadiums with allowances made for the width of a soccer field.

But they’ve done it before. The Los Angeles Galaxy played at Aloha Stadium in 2008. David Beckham, who criticized artificial turf upon his arrival in MLS, played in that game.

So what happened since then? Did the stadium try a different method of widening the field than was used in 2008? Has the surface simply deteriorated?

Men’s soccer has been through plenty of turf issues in the past couple of generations. The NASL played on old-school artificial turf. The Dallas Burn spent one season in Dragon Stadium, a high school football stadium that was OK for Friday night games in Texas but turned into a broiler in the summer heat. The Burn, no longer willing to take their name literally, moved back to the Cotton Bowl before settling into permanent facilities elsewhere.

Most of the narrow fields are gone. The Columbus Crew will play today in their spacious home, not Ohio State’s narrow football stadium. But turf is still an issue in MLS, and some players are “rested” when it’s time to play on the fake stuff.

So field quality is an ongoing issue. The question now: What can be learned from the Hawaii incident?

For U.S. Soccer, it simply shows venues must be vetted more thoroughly. But I’m also curious to know how a stadium that has hosted elite pro soccer in the past along with its usual college and pro football was unable to pull it off here.

Update: To clarify, it appears Rapinoe was injured on a training field, not at Aloha Stadium. It was on grass, in fact, though reliable sources suggest it was a poor grass field.

I’ve been chatting a lot on Twitter today — some good discussion, some “how dare you ask questions and not just be satisfied with our narrative that U.S. Soccer doesn’t care about women?” nonsense. The latter does not cover the women’s soccer community in glory.

Yes, we should ask why the men play on grass-over-turf (which often incurs its own set of problems) while the women play on turf. Yes, we should ask why the training field was so bad.

But we can and should ask whether this should be the last straw in terms of the men and women playing in unsuitable venues. U.S. Soccer clearly needs to overhaul the way it vets its venues, period. Maybe international games should all be in MLS stadiums with grass. (Sorry, Portland.)

And, to get outside of our soccer bubble, we can and should ask whether the Aloha Stadium turf is unsafe for college football. Or the Pro Bowl.

So thanks to those of you on Twitter who found these questions interesting. In the long run, I think these questions will help all athletes. Including women’s soccer players.

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soccer

Questions to ask after E:60 turf story

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let me toss in some disclaimers at the beginning:

  1. I worry about everything.
  2. I’m a big fan of Julie Foudy, and I’m glad ESPN has put her to work in ways that take advantage of her soccer expertise, her advocacy, and her inquisitive nature.
  3. I’m not a big fan of the E:60 production style. The fake newsroom meeting to introduce each segment. The ominous music.

TV is a difficult medium for investigative journalism. You can’t broadcast a spreadsheet. Compare the E:60 piece on artificial turf with Bloody Elbow’s investigation of UFC finances. Which one is more in depth?

So my biggest disappointments with the E:60 story are these:

  1. Where’s the accompanying web piece? ESPN’s E:60 page is woefully out of date. The only thing I found on the ESPN home page was “E:60 excerpt.”
  2. The piece devoted 44 seconds to someone who has actually studied the issue, Gary Ginsberg. One man’s tragic illness and death got much more than that.

And yet, there’s something here worth pursuing. The E:60 piece may keep the ball rolling, as prior reports by NBC and others have done.

The truth about turf is likely somewhere in the large space between “absolutely harmless – let your kids eat the pellets by the handful” and “do not ever, ever play on it.” It was interesting to see Amy Griffin, who has been compiling a long list of soccer players with cancer, still leading her team in practice on a turf field on a sunny day in which you’d think a nearby grass field would be OK.

Griffin’s no hypocrite, and she doesn’t deserve the backlash she’s been getting. I get the sense that she actually sees this as something other than a binary issue. And no one can blame her for raising the concerns that she has.

And even the Ginsberg study suggested that we may need some safe-handling measures when it comes to playing on turf — just as we would for kids playing on grass that’s been recently fertilized. (Or, in the case of Northern Virginia fields in November, recently covered in goose poop.)

Check the Ginsberg abstract:

Based upon these findings, outdoor and indoor synthetic turf fields are not associated with elevated adverse health risks. However, it would be prudent for building operators to provide adequate ventilation to prevent a buildup of rubber-related volatile organic chemicals (VOC) and SVOC at indoor fields.

“Wait, wait,” you may be saying. “If it’s harmless, why ventilate?”

Because the study doesn’t show that crumb rubber pellets are harmless in large quantities. Yes, there are materials in those pellets that could be harmful if you had enough exposure to them. (Hate to tell you this — but that’s also true of stuff in your food. Look up how much nasty stuff is allowed to be in your food as long as the quantities are small enough. We’re talking maggots in your mushrooms.)

These are old tires. You put tires on your car. You may even change your own tires, and you probably don’t think you’re going to get cancer from it. You should probably wash your hands, though, after you change them.

So future study, in academia and the media, should be geared toward ensuring we keep a safe level of exposure.

Which leads to some questions worth pursuing:

  1. Should we set a temperature limit on turf fields, both for possible airborne exposure to chemicals and so players don’t collapse from the heat?
  2. Should goalkeeper training, where goalkeepers spend much more time with their faces on the field than they do in games, be held on grass as much as possible?
  3. Can we educate parents and kids so kids aren’t building little mounds of pellets and then eating a snack without washing their hands? (That should apply to grass, too. Again — fertilizer and poop. We forget basic hygiene too often.)
  4. Why goalkeepers and not football players who spend even more time rolling around on this stuff? Is it just because they’re wearing mouthpieces? Do running backs and linemen never get this stuff on their faces?
  5. How does the rate of illness among young soccer players compare with the rate of the general population?
  6. And finally — how many of Amy Griffin’s names are in Washington state? Is there something in particular about some turf installations in that area?

So I’m not pulling my kids off their turf fields. I’m also not totally banning hot dogs in our household — just limiting them. But I will have them wash up, and I’m curious to see what future studies say.

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