Deconstructing The Sports Field Development Process feat Sprinturf's Mat Steinberg

Fond du Lac Roots & Fruth Field

Adam: Okay, so are you from Fond du
Lac, Matt?

Matt: Yeah, essentially grew up in
Fond du Lac — was not born here. My dad was teaching and coaching in Colby,
Wisconsin, when I was born, so I was actually born in Marshfield. Before I was
even in kindergarten, he ended up getting one of the physical education jobs at
the high school at Goodrich — assistant football coach, head track coach as
well — and that ran from there. All my sisters went through Fond du Lac. We've
stayed here the whole time.

Adam: So Fruth Field or what?

Matt: Yeah, that's probably 15 blocks
away from here.

Adam: Is it that far? It might not be
that far. But they still — do they still play on that field?

Matt: No, they do. And that's the
issue right now — it's got that historic legacy, because they've been playing
there since the 20s, essentially. But it floods a lot. They've got that issue
now. And the fact that it's not on campus anymore — logistically, it's a pain
in the butt to move everything down there for the game and back. Springs has
always played there as well. When I was in junior high, all the junior highs
played there too — Sabish and Theisen, and good old Woodworth, back when it was
still open, then closed, then opened again. So it's got a lot of use. There's a
lot of old legacy to it, but the facility — the field needs to be up at the
high school.

Adam: I mean, that new high school —
such a cool facility — and they've got, I believe, a good amount of room over
there.

Matt: They do. And some of it you've
got to watch out, just because it's in that area where it gets a little marshy,
back in some of those areas behind the school and stuff. So you've got to
always watch out what you can do back there, and I think they found that out.

Flood Plains & Sports Facilities

Adam: Is it true that a lot of sports
facilities are in flood plains? Is that common? We're obviously in the lighting
business, we deal with footings and concrete, and it seems like about nine
times out of ten, when the contractor goes to dig the footing, they end up
hitting water not too far below grade. From your experience, is that a common
problem?

Matt: You do see it a lot, just
because it's open, flat — true for the most part. What else are they going to
do with it? You're going to try to fit in as many fields, whether they're
baseball, softball, a bunch of rectangles for soccer and everything else — lacrosse
and football. That's kind of where it goes. Obviously a lot of what we're doing
is at a high school inside of a track, or at a college — maybe a track, maybe
not. But the big complexes are the ones that you see, those multi-field places.
You see a lot of that now — they're pushing out more into small farm fields. I
was just down in Kenosha this morning, and they've got all those different
areas where it's just flat plowed fields, and then they've got this huge
warehouse — Amazon or whatever — is there. Those are prime spots nowadays for
sports complexes too.

Adam: You're seeing it by fulfillment
centers, or just —?

Matt: Just that type of land. Just
those types of areas where you're right next to a metro, yet it's still
quasi-agricultural. Easy in and easy out.

Adam: Flat — you're not dealing with
the hills and sometimes streams and creeks.

Matt: Yep, all that kind of stuff.

Matt's Background: Football & Coaching

Adam: So you started out in
Marshfield, family came to Fond du Lac, and you also did some coaching at some
point as well?

Matt: Right. All through school here —
was on the '87 state championship team, senior year.

Adam: Wow. What position did you play?

Matt: I bounced around — linebacker,
D-line — wherever they needed you. A bunch of the guys are still in town, which
is great. That's why I love coming back — get a chance to catch up with
everybody. Then I went to college, played football out at North Dakota State,
in Fargo, and I met my wife out there. Then I got into coaching, was a GA at
North Dakota State, and then coached college football in Missouri and Colorado
for close to 15 years. When that dried up — through some connections back from
North Dakota State, guys that were landscape architects — they had connections
with the original generation of the newfangled turf, and they're always looking
for guys, former coaches, former players, so you can talk the talk of the
athletic side of things, but then you can be a quick learn on the turf side of
things. Not so much business, but just the ins and outs of turf. So that fit in
good. We were able to get back to the upper Midwest, for some odd reason, and
now we're settled in central Minnesota — we're west of Minneapolis about 45
miles. St. Cloud. It just ended up being where Sprinturf was looking for
someone in the upper Midwest. My wife was from more the Fargo–Moorhead area, me
being from Fond du Lac — we were kind of well in between. That's where we settled
in, because Sprinturf, for whatever reason, had a nice little footprint in
Minnesota, even going back to the early 2000s, when things were just starting
to get going. They were in a couple of places in St. Paul. They had done a
couple of fields at Saint John's University in central Minnesota, only about 15
miles from where we live now. So that's where we landed.

Matt: Now my area's expanded — I've
been to Dickinson, North Dakota, at Dickinson State University, and we're at
Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. So that's the width of my territory.

Adam: On the road quite a bit?

Matt: Yeah, like this week I was in
Ames, Iowa, Kenosha, and now I'm back here.

Adam: Do you like that sometimes?

Matt: Yeah, it's a balance. Especially
we're getting to the point now where it's a lot easier — not so much gas
prices, but roads, you don't have to worry about snow coming in or anything
like that. The busiest part of the year for us, from my standpoint, is in the
fall, where you're getting ready to bid on projects or set proposals up for
projects, and then the bid season runs — basically now — it's almost from
Thanksgiving through about now. We're kind of wrapping up. We've still got some
things out there that we're keeping an eye on, but we're starting to get to the
point where we're transitioning to construction.

History of Synthetic Turf

Adam: So what's the history of turf?
Was there an original inventor of artificial turf, and how did things
transition from traditional sod? What does that look like, and when did it
start?

Matt: The timeline — you can go way
back to the very late 60s. The timeline was — trying to think of the name now,
they're still in fertilizer — it escapes me, but it used to be called ChemLawn,
I believe, something like that. ChemGrass — they were making essentially — it
was nylon, and that's the original AstroTurf. Going all the way back to that.
And everything was like a carpet.

Adam: Carpet on top of —?

Matt: Yeah, a little bit of a pad
underneath. Rug burns all the time. I played on that as well. It was brutal.
About the late 90s, a couple of different entities along the line had seen in
Europe where they were doing something that's a little more what they call the
long hair — the actual grass fibers — and different ideas on what to use for
the infill, so you've got traction and you've got the cushioning without the
pad. Because the pads become really cost-inefficient and unaffordable. It got
to the point, probably mid-90s, they came up with a pretty good idea on what
they needed, how to put the product together, what infill works the best — the
crumb rubber and the mix of the sand, or just the crumb rubber. From there it
kind of took off. The big name was FieldTurf, and they're still around as that
brand. They're a small little part of the whole Tarkett conglomerate, the
flooring company that's all over the world. A couple other companies had come
and gone. There were companies that were making this type of material for other
applications and then evolved into the idea of extruding the green fiber. But a
lot of that extrusion was happening in Europe still, and it still does today.
Holland's a big — TenCate is a big company that does all the extrusion of the
polyethylene fibers, all different applications. And obviously this is one of
them.

Sprinturf Origins

Matt: Sprinturf was different, where
they had started as a small group that was doing sports surfaces and got into
this in the Philadelphia area — a couple of guys — and tried to make their own
name. This was back in '97, '98, so they were getting in on the front end. It
really grew from there. They were making splashes, like I said, in the metro
Twin Cities area, or the Philadelphia or the Atlanta area, even far out west in
California. They were all over the place. They were basically a
supply-and-install company — they dealt with providing the type of turf to
essentially their spec, or whatever the spec was, and then installing it as
well. I came in, joined in '06, after I got out of coaching, '06–'07. Jumped in
in the middle of that first generation. Since then, things have really evolved
a little bit in terms of what type of fiber you're using and that kind of
stuff. In '10, right after the economic downturn — in '08, '09, where things
really slowed down — Sprinturf, as that supply-install company, merged or essentially
was absorbed by the main manufacturer that we were dealing with, who were based
out of Atlanta at the time. When we merged, it became Integrated Turf
Solutions, doing business as Sprinturf. So we're actually kind of like you guys
— we're making our own product here in the U.S., we're distributing it
ourselves, and we're installing ourselves too.

Adam: Truly vertically integrated.

Matt: That's really been our — for
over a decade — kind of a one-stop shop.

Adam: Right, exactly. And there are
two phases to it: there's the turf, but then there's also the excavation and
the base construction. So we've partnered with places, and when you get into
sports facilities, when there's lighting involved, we've been able to partner
up with different groups.

Matt: There's always that, okay,
what's the next step for Sprinturf? Do we stay where we're at? We've never done
track surfaces — that's always another one, because those always seem to go
hand in hand, turf and track. Flooring, other applications. We have a whole
other side of the industry from a landscape specialty product side too, called
ProGreen. The product comes out of our plants in Dadeville, Alabama, and
Chatsworth, Georgia. Again, it's all coming through the same system in terms of
the company, but they're just much smaller projects, much different type of
turf — lawns, dog runs, batting cages, anything that's essentially not an
athletic field is the whole ProGreen side of things. So there's a lot cooking.

The Sales Pitch for Turf

Adam: What's the sales pitch for turf?
I'm sure I could come up with a few obvious ideas, but when you go into an
athletic department or you meet with a landscape architect, what's the sales
pitch? What's the cost difference between traditional turf and — obviously, it
doesn't need to be cut like a traditional lawn, so there are maintenance
savings — but what is your pitch for an owner?

Matt: A lot of those questions have
been answered over the last couple of decades, so the curiosity factor isn't
really there anymore, or the luxury factor, except for some communities where
it's still considered maybe a luxury they don't need. Really it comes down to
being able to meet the needs of what they're looking for. The biggest one is
accessibility — being able to get more than just a limited number of games on
the field. The idea of the synthetic turf, now as we know it, the infill
systems, is to be able to provide the kids — whatever level they're at — when
they step on the field, it's as close to pristine natural turf as they can get,
from a feel, from a look, from a safety standpoint, all those different things,
no matter what they've done beforehand. So you could have baseball practice in
the morning, a soccer camp in the afternoon, and then there's a JV football
game that night. Each time the kid went out there, all those different
activities throughout the day, they're stepping onto the best field they could
possibly be on.

Adam: Whereas you're not going to get
that with natural grass — there's a big rut or a divot.

Matt: Right, exactly. There isn't a
sprinkler head, there isn't the unwavering bit that you see. So it's really
accessibility, consistency throughout the day, throughout practice, games. And
then when you get into the idea of the maintenance, like you're talking about —
you're not mowing it, you're not fertilizing, you're not watering it, you're
not marking it. That's a lot of time where the field's actually offline, and it
becomes — if you talk about Fruth or every school, that facility now becomes
the centerpiece for activity, whether it's during the weekday for classes,
physics classes doing some kind of experiment. Even at the smaller levels — we
did a field for Southwestern High School in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. The field
is literally right next to a dairy farm, and the calf barns are right next to
the field. The field's done — it's a beautiful little facility, football,
soccer. The first activity that happened on that field when it was opened was
elementary school recess, and the kids were out there just going bananas, just
running around. Turns it into a multi-dimensional asset, as opposed to just
being used for the once-a-week activity. It doesn't sit dormant for so long.
And then just in general, you can extend your season of use as well. Even into Thanksgiving,
when it is getting cold or there's been a little bit of snow, you can push that
snow off and still use it. Same thing now, when you've got the freeze-thaw,
snow coming in tonight — it's still going to be a usable facility.

Heated Fields

Adam: Have you guys done any heated
fields? I know it was a big deal a couple decades back when Lambeau Field got
heated turf. Have you had to get involved with any projects like that?

Matt: I don't know if we've done any
specifically. But the companies that still do that — they're basically
saltwater running through tubes underneath that keep the temperature — on the
natural side, obviously, for the grass to continue to grow and stay green. From
a turf standpoint, you don't see it as much. They did it where the Gophers play
football now — it was TCF Bank Stadium — they did that when the Vikings moved
in a couple of years back, so they could keep the snow off. Basically it was a
help for snow melt, and to keep it a little more playable, because the field in
December still freezes, and they can get pretty hard. So that was another idea
— just to keep it safe as well. It's not quite as much, because you can just
plow the field off if you need to.

Adam: You can plow it just like
anything else?

Matt: You have to re-sprinkle in some
of the rubber pellets — the rubber pellets get stuck in the snow and get pushed
off to the side. So a lot of places up north — we've done a number of fields at
DC Everest, Merrill, Medford, Tomahawk, Rhinelander. When they do push snow,
they end up with piles of black on the sides, and when it's starting to melt,
it looks kind of shabby, but it's easily brushed back in, redistributed,
reused.

Product Architecture

Adam: Walk me through the product
architecture here. You're nice enough to bring in some samples — what are the
different components of your product?

Matt: The main things you've got are
the green grass fiber itself, which on the extrusion side, they're still
calling it yarn as it comes out of the extrusion machines. It comes out as more
or less a piece of yarn, and it gets cut and then applied to the back.

Adam: It's on big spools?

Matt: It's on big spools, and all that
extrusion happens in Alabama for us. Then all that gets shipped to the tufting
and coating plant in Chatsworth, Georgia, where these big huge multi-needle
looms run. The backing is three layers of fabric. That runs through the loom,
the yarn gets tufted in and cut at a certain height — and all that's variable.
Ultimately those big rolls, once they're tufted, run through a coating machine
that puts on a secondary backing of urethane coating that seals everything
together.

Adam: So you guys have sub-assemblies
of different styles of grass, or do you kind of make every field to order based
on the size of the extrusion and other dimensions?

Matt: It's a little bit of both.
Whereas the fibers are typically — on our end, the fiber, the yarn, is
basically either going to be a monofilament fiber or a slit-film fiber. Slit
film is the original technology, where instead of coming out as blades of grass,
it came out as a sheet of green, and then it was perforated and cut. That's how
they created the fiber, and that was designed to split apart as the field aged,
and it trapped all the infill, so you won't see it flying around as much. This
sample was kind of brushed out, but that gives you an idea — how that fiber
splits apart. It's still used today. The monofilament is the other side of
things, where it's extruded through a spinneret, so it's got shape to it, and
it comes out like a spaghetti noodle basically.

Adam: This kind of looks like a rough
on a golf course.

Matt: Right. Slit film fell out of
favor, I think because originally that was all that was used. And then when
monofilament came in, everybody goes, oh yeah, the samples — that looks like
our grass, that's what we want. And then the industry more or less realized
that, well, one or the other doesn't work great by itself. Combining the two is
the best way to go. So since '06–'07, at least on our side of things — we were
slower to go to monofilament, but we were combining the fibers in every other
roll as it's tufted in. That's become almost the go-to across the board in the
industry, whether you're playing football or it's a multi-sport or it's
baseball. You're dealing with what we call dual fiber, so you've got the
monofilament and the slit film. Get a little bit of both — the good look and
the fiber that traps the infill to keep it from flying around.

Field Maintenance

Adam: What does maintenance look like?
If something gets damaged on the field, do you replace a patch, or you replace
a roll? What does that look like?

Matt: Usually it's a really small area
that ends up being a patch. Usually it's a line. When the field gets installed
originally, we call it the belly of the field — basically the big rolls run
from football sideline to football sideline, and all you see is green, and
white football yard lines, that's it. Then on the outside, the rolls go the
other way — they go across, and on the outside of the sideline they run along
the sidelines, or whatever. Then once all that's green, all the other markings
— the logos, the hash marks, the football numerals, soccer lines, lacrosse
lines, baseball base marks — where the softball bases would go, we can put
little tick marks in. All that gets inlaid in after it's green, and then
ultimately the infill goes in last — gets brushed in last. A lot of times those
lines are what potentially come loose, the inlays. We're talking after
sometimes four or five years before anything really happens. One thing we found
on soccer fields and lacrosse fields, where the lacrosse goalie is — they're
really good at scuffing things up, like a hockey goalie does in front of the
crease. So they scuff up, which means the infill is getting scuffed, and then
ultimately that means the fiber and the fabric is getting worn down faster than
everywhere else. So those little patches — sometimes it's a two-by-one or
two-foot patch, sometimes it's six-inch by six-inch, or sometimes it's just
re-gluing the line back down.

Adam: Well, at least if there is some
type of maintenance event — you don't have to get up on a 60-foot lift. In our
world, if there's some type of maintenance event, it's a little bit more
challenging.

Matt: Yeah, it's a lot of hands and
knees.

Adam: We get super excited anytime we
work on a project with a turf field, because it makes the lighting look that
much nicer. That's why we like some of the videos you guys have, where the
fields just pop. When you guys are displaying the lights, we're looking at the
green turf going, man, that looks good.

Matt: That's a win-win.

Project Management & Sales Process

Adam: What does the process of a
construction project look like? Who are the people involved? As a regional
sales manager, who do you call on? What does the project management process
look like? How many of your projects start out with a landscape architect? How
many of them are discretionary?

Matt: Sometimes that varies from
region to region. Up here in the upper Midwest, almost everything runs through
either a landscape architect or a civil engineer that's kind of morphed into a
specialty of athletic field design. The guys at Rettler Corporation do a lot
here in Wisconsin. Point of Beginnings is another one where they do a lot. And
then there's some other civil engineering firms, whether it's down in
Milwaukee, that every once in a while have a project come up. So one of the
main things I'll do is constantly be in contact with them — not so much on
product, although that's always part of the discussion, but just what's coming
up, who they're working with, who's ultimately looking at a new project,
whether it's a full conversion.

Adam: Understanding the pipeline.

Matt: Yeah, because they're way on the
front end of a lot of that stuff. They're even dealing with schools when
they're doing tennis court resurfacing, or parking lots. Then ultimately the
work comes their way for the field or the facility redevelopment. So that's one
part of it. The other part of it is, we've still got to be really focused on
the end user as well, and trying to make sure they're familiar with the fact
that there are other brand names, and certain names mean things in terms of —
are you talking generically? Like Kleenex — you guys deal with that a little
bit with certain names. So a lot of that is, you're trying to make sure you
differentiate yourself enough, and then also promote the projects that you do
do as well. From that standpoint, you're on the sales side quite a bit, and
promotion. And then ultimately, part of our role as the regional manager would
be, now we're collecting the bid docs and the forms, running through the spec,
getting that into our estimation office, pushing all that over to our
estimators. And ultimately, if we win the proposal with the bid, then it goes
to operations, and then everything — then you finally get to the work
standpoint, manufacturing and delivery and installation. There's a lot of
different energy you're trying to touch on. Because my area's so big, I
sometimes really want to get a little deeper with certain things, like say the
Fondy Soccer Complex. I've got to keep in touch with those guys as much as
possible, and yet here I am chasing specs for the project up in Stevens Point
or the project in St. Cloud. So you're constantly trying to backtrack and make
sure you hit all the touches you need to hit, in terms of a sales thing and a
familiarity standpoint. Most of the time in Wisconsin, Minnesota's the same way,
Iowa is always like this as well — you've got to win the bid. So you've got to
be on top of: where's their budget, what are they looking for, are we meeting
the spec, does the spec fit us. You've got to negotiate all those things. It's
crazy how much happens in the last 1% of the bid process — the technicalities
of how the documents need to get dropped off, where they get dropped off, and
all that.

Sales 101 for Engineered Products

Adam: It sounds like a quasi sales,
project management, marketing — there are a lot of facets to what you do. If
you had to write a book on Sales 101 in an engineered-product sales
environment, what are some of the highlights you would touch on? I would imagine
you rely on teams, you rely on engineers and other people to help support some
of the projects. There's probably certain things you can't always control. But
what are some of the highlights in a technical product that are important for
salespeople to understand?

Matt: From an end-user standpoint,
when you're dealing with different types of sports, you want to make sure that
the turf system — the whole thing — is matching up with the way you'd want it
to perform. The biggest difference is when you're talking baseball/softball as
opposed to soccer/football/lacrosse. That's the biggest divide really in the
industry.

Face Weight

Matt: Within that, now you're dealing
with some of the big factors that we're always touching on, like face weight —
the amount of grass per square yard. Over time we've found, kind of like you
guys deal with light poles — the better the gauge, the better that pole's
probably going to be — same thing, the higher the face weight, the better your
field is going to be in year 10, 11, 12, when it's been there what everybody
assumes is forever, and it's still performing, still holding the infill, still
looks good.

Infill

Matt: The other bit is infill: how
much rubber is used for cushioning and traction, how much sand is used for
perceived stability and weight. There's a big range of where companies like to
be at, and where it's potentially the safest, and all those different things.
So you're always trying to hit on a lot of those points. Sprinturf has always
been very good at — because we're our own manufacturer, we don't have a
cookie-cutter type —

Adam: Very similar to us — you can
custom-tailor it based on the requirements.

Matt: If the pile is only two inches,
then you need this much infill. If you want this much infill, how much sand do
you want? You know, this is going to look better with this face weight. You've
got to measure all those things out. And that's where the designers help,
because most of them now have done enough projects where they're setting a
fairly standardized spec that almost everybody can meet.

Landscape Architects & Engineering

Adam: When you say designers, you mean
landscape architects? We have an application engineering team at Wisconsin
Lighting Lab that does CAD work, supports designers and engineers — we do
layouts, we do custom mechanical fabrication. It sounds like you're a technical
guy and your sales process is very technical. What does the engineering team at
Sprinturf look like, or is a lot of it outsourced to the landscape architects?

Matt: Most of it is, and that's just
the way the industry runs. Whereas from our side, where our technical side is
the actual extrusion — which is well beyond me. You're talking resins and
polymers and things like that. A lot of that just would fly by everybody.

Adam: The chemists.

Matt: Right, exactly. A lot of that
gets farmed to the field designers, where they come up with their specs,
something they've used, they like, they're comfortable with. Every once in a
while there are still some architects out there that really get pigeonholed
into, it's got to be this, which means it's only one brand of turf, where they
don't really make it competitive. So you're always dealing with that a little
bit. But on the other side of the sales thing, you've really got to push the
fact that we are factory-direct. There's a lot more value in what we're doing
from a bid standpoint, and you can limit the downside of the telephone game.

The Telephone Game & Supply Chain

Adam: You're always one point of
contact from the actual manufacturing process.

Matt: That's the one thing that I
think gets missed a lot. Even if you're talking other sports services, whether
it's tracks or gym floors or whatever, where you're buying a product through a
distributor and then they have somebody else come in and install it — so you're
never really talking to the same person or the same company that you've had in
your head, as to, oh, we're getting this. You lose that connectivity.

Adam: With us, we have multiple
channels to market, and for us, regardless of the channel, we always try and
get in front of the engineers, the specifiers, even if we're supporting a
distributor or a sales agency. We always try and push to get in front of the right
people just to limit that telephone game.

Matt: And then in the long run,
because there is a fairly transient type of industry, people move around,
companies come and go. I've heard some of the podcasts — supply chain is such a
huge issue nowadays. We've been able to miss that hurdle quite a bit, because
we're all in-house and in the U.S., so we're not dealing with shipping. But a
lot of product is still — especially yarn — still coming over from Holland or
the Middle East. So there's all kinds of delays and that kind of stuff. I've
tried to really emphasize to end users — you may be talking to Company Z, but
yet the product is actually coming from D and E. Even though you've never heard
of D and E, and you have no idea where they are, that's what you're actually
buying. So that's what we try to really provide the value of — you can actually
go to the plant, you can see where the product is actually produced, and who's
going to be installing it. We do about 90% of our own installation.

Vertically Integrated Install

Adam: That's awesome. So truly
vertically integrated all the way to install. Unique. That gets spun a lot in
the industry, as to who actually is integrated and who's not vertically
integrated. Do you have to be licensed to do install at that level, or is it certified?

Matt: Certified. All our guys run
through a training every year. We've got 50% of our crew foremen have been with
us for over a decade, so they're really seasoned. It's not easy work, but
they're out there — they're the rock stars, because they really get it done.
Everything's so efficient because they're so used to the system. They know how
the rolls come off the truck, they know what the next step is all the way
along. If there's a hiccup with the plans — what's actually happening on the
field — they can make the switch fairly easily when those guys are installing.
Whereas when you get subcontractor guys, they just want to get done.

Final Assembly in the Field

Adam: It's almost like you guys are
doing your final assembly right in the field. The plant builds the
sub-assemblies, and your install team does the final build. Pretty quickly. Do
you have a network of excavating companies or other folks that you can partner
with to support the owners and end users?

Matt: Up here it's the upper Midwest —
Minnesota, Wisconsin — it's a little bit different where there's almost a
divide — not a divide in a bad way — you've got your field builders, and
they're bidding on certain scopes of work. Then turf is a lot of times a separate
scope. So we're able to concentrate a lot heavier on just the system itself and
what we're actually proposing and what we're throwing a bid in on.

Field Builder Specifics

Adam: When you say field builder, is
that the GC or the excavator that's shaping the area?

Matt: The excavators — and sometimes
they're hand in hand. The excavators and the folks that understand the really
tight tolerances you're dealing with when you're excavating down to the
subgrade. The subgrade has to be at 95% compaction. Then you bring in the
stone, the size of stone, the gradation, and then the second-level stone is the
leveling lift, where it's a little bit smaller, a little bit dusty, a little
bit dirtier, but you can actually grade that out to almost pool-table smooth.
And that's what the turf gets laid on most of the time. The other big step is
ultimately getting into underlayment pads, like you were looking at, where
there are different types of pads now. They've taken safety to the next level.
The turf's been around for nearly three decades, and it's been tremendous from
a safety standpoint — collisions and falling on the turf and rug burns have
disappeared for the most part. But now the pads really have come back into
favor, because they're so much more affordable and easier to install. The pad
really ensures the safety of the field, especially from a shock-attenuation
standpoint.

Design Life

Adam: What is the design life of the
turf?

Matt: For well over two decades —
we're seeing right now — the original generation of turf fields are probably
lasting somewhere between 10 and 12 years. Some fields need to come out at
nine, some are making it to 12 or 13. So you're right in that range. I think a
lot of times now, with what we've done with the fibers and the resins, you're
going to get beyond that 12, before schools need to start thinking, oh man,
we've really got to start looking at this and get a plan together for the
replacement. The pads now — a lot of folks are using those — will be there for
at least a couple of turf cycles. Most of them are going to carry a warranty of
at least 14, if not 24 years. Turf warranty is only eight, so you've got a
little bit of discrepancy there. But especially out east, where that's been
kind of the norm for a lot longer, we've replaced a number of fields that have
the pad there, where we're only maybe patching or replacing some pieces of pad
or underlayment, and then putting the new turf right back on top.

Competition & Market Education

Adam: As you kind of alluded to on the
lighting side, that market — as far as the mass market — is really dominated by
one to two huge companies. I'm curious, from a product-technology standpoint on
the turf side, how long did it take the landscape architects and some of the
other folks to start to become more self-sufficient on the design side? Where
did it switch from training and education of the market to people being more
self-sufficient? How much do you see your competitors creating confusion at
times with some of the folks involved with the purchasing decisions?

Matt: The confusion is probably part
of the game in some respects, for a lot of those companies where they're trying
to hold on to market share. It's not so much that competitors have been added,
but the competitors have gotten better. However you want to look at it — there
are a couple of different ways to put the system together, like we talked about
with the face weight and the infill stuff. People have realized maybe there's
not just one mousetrap — there's a couple that work really well. That's helped.
But I actually came in, coming out of coaching and into this, right as that had
already transitioned. Fields had been around, especially out east, for nearly a
decade. The original fields in Wisconsin probably went in in like '03 or '04,
'05. So I was just coming in when those were going into the ground, or had been
in the ground already. So there was already a lot of that that had taken place.
It was probably before my time in terms of when it became: you've got a
landscape architect, you've got a turf company, and then you've got field
builders. I think that had already sifted itself out.

LED Technology Shift Parallel

Adam: Originally — as you know, in the
lighting side — there was a major technology shift over the last decade from
more traditional lighting sources to LED. And the major players were very
hesitant to transition to LED. Sports and high-mast and infrastructure lighting
is really the last market to do a large transition from metal halide to LED. A
lot of it was based on the education in the market, which was coming from a
single source of information. That's one of the things I would say is getting a
little bit easier, because customers do know there are other options out there.
Whereas traditionally, you had one large company preaching one gospel and one
preaching another. What we try to do is give people options. You don't want an
infinite menu, but it's like, hey, if you want remote power, we've got an
option for you. If it's a budget job and you want onboard, we've got an option
for you. Traditionally, if it was coming through two huge companies, their
sales teams and their engineers were going to push that solution regardless of
whether it was best for the customer or not. Now that the LED technology and
the controls technology and solid-state lighting has been in the market for a
number of years, it seems as though the market has become more aware of some of
the real information. I was just curious on that comparison. But as you said,
maybe that started a few years before your time.

Matt: It's still evolving. It's very
interesting how similar some of our experiences have been. That same battle
that we're always dealing with — okay, we can actually make and provide
whatever the end user wants, but you've got to limit them a little bit, otherwise
you're scrambling all the time from a manufacturing standpoint. So you really
try to hone in. But yet someone says, well, isn't your baseball system two
inches on the outfield and an inch and a half on the infield? And we're like,
well, yeah, that one is, but this one over here is all two inches, or this
one's an inch and three-quarters. You really have to balance out: I don't want
to confuse them, but I want to make sure they're getting what's probably best
for what they need, but also allow them some options too. There's a lot of that
balance that still goes on. You'll see that even from the architectural side,
where spec adjusts a little bit over time — especially if you're dealing with
pads, because that changes what you want to do with the turf, to make sure it's
not too soft or too cushy. You want to hit that right balance. You've got to be
able to run fast too. The softer the pad, the slower people are going to run.
If you run on a wrestling mat for about two minutes it feels great, and then
all of a sudden your calves are sore and your knees are achy, because it's so
squishy, and you're like, oh, this maybe isn't so good.

Player Feedback

Adam: Have you had players or coaches
or scouts — the turf in the field can change things, player to player, area to
area. I don't know if they're measuring the speed of a player, or performance,
or how much the turf can affect that. Do you get feedback from coaches and from
players?

Matt: Yeah, some. Older fields are
going to feel hard, or they're so used to it that they don't realize they're on
a field that's probably maybe a little too hard. Then they get onto a new
field, or they get their field replaced and now it's new again and fresh, and
they're like, oh man, this is really soft, I don't know if I like this. You get
some of that. So much of our market is on the high school side of things, or
the small college market, where we're not dealing with Camp Randall, we're not
dealing with Ohio State University or anything like that. So some of that
really minute perception we don't deal with a whole lot.

Adam: Maybe in Texas.

Matt: Every once in a while. But you
do get some of it. The fresh field's always going to feel softer.

Sprinturf's All-Rubber System & Dual Fiber

Matt: Sprinturf really made a lot of
hay — and actually probably stayed in business — when they first came out. The
original idea was, you need a lot of sand and some rubber. Sand weights
everything down, that's what we have here, but it makes it — actually, I don't
have any sand in my little sample kit there — but a lot of silica sand and then
some rubber. Overall, the sand just makes the field really firm. Sprinturf went
the other way and patented an all-rubber system. The reason why the sand's
there basically is to flatten it down. It should be used as ballast, to keep
the carpet — the width of the whole breadth of that — down and flat, because
the product was so light. Well, Sprinturf went the other way and beefed up the
fiber face weight, beefed up the backing, added the dimensional stability into
the coating, and said, well, we don't need that eight pounds per square foot,
we need three and a half. We've done a number of all-rubber fields. That was
one of the first hooks that Sprinturf had — no sand.

Adam: No sand. Nice.

Matt: The moisture wicks away faster,
your field might not freeze as fast — lots of things that people talk about.

Adam: Improve a design with fewer
components — that's always the dream.

Matt: We still do them. We have a
couple of fields we use it now, maybe a little bit more as a value-added
option, especially on the high school side. Every once in a while a college
still considers that when they're really looking at being tight on their budget,
or making sure they get something within a budget. We've still done a number of
all-rubber fields that perform fantastic. They don't have a pad that would be
too soft, but that works really well.

Dual Fiber as Sprinturf Genesis

Matt: And then obviously the
dual-fiber system that Sprinturf — basically everyone thought Sprinturf was
going to go out of business back in '07 when we weren't doing 100%
monofilament, because that was the rage. Instead of hanging on to old
technology, we had a company that thought newer technology was always going to
be better. Ultimately that fad came and went a little bit. But the idea of
combining the two fibers was really a Sprinturf genesis, and ended up being —
now every field we do in Wisconsin, almost, the spec is probably going to be
dual fiber. Every once in a while there's a monofilament in there still from an
old spec, or — soccer tends to want a little bit more monofilament, because the
fibers have shape, so it's got a little more resiliency, so the ball sits up
better, rolls more natural. Slit film will tend to ultimately curl and lay flat
— like Bermuda grass down south that we never see — but the ball skips, and it
doesn't kick as well, because it lays down too much.

Adam: Got to always be teed up for
them, right?

Matt: Right. So combining the two
really has been great when you're talking about almost everybody needs to use
it for more than just one sport. So being able to combine all those perceptions
of what a sport needs into the dual-fiber system has been a great move for
Sprinturf, even though I don't know if technically they planned it that way,
but it's worked out awesome.

Closing Thoughts

Adam: Becca said we've got about two
or three minutes left. Is there anything else you want to touch on — closing
thoughts?

Matt: There are a couple of
communities in the state of Wisconsin that could really use synthetic turf, and
hopefully that's on the way. We'll see what happens here as planning continues,
and maybe a couple of other places. But I know this one's always been a focus
for me, obviously — trying to get some synthetic turf somewhere besides up on
the hill.

Adam: Well, come back anytime. If you
ever have to do a presentation or you want to use the showroom, that'd be
great. I'm sure they need lights as well.

Matt: I'll take you up on that. Might
be a win-win.

Adam: Great. Well, man, you really
know your stuff. Sounds like a cool company. More turf fields the better,
because it makes the lighting look amazing. So thanks for coming on.

Matt: Vice versa. Thanks, Adam, I
appreciate it. Thank you.