A new season, a new field for Waverly

WAVERLY – No one had to tell the young men on Waverly’s football team how important Friday night’s game was.

It was not just the first game of the season — it was a week one, cross-town rivalry matchup played to packed bleachers and screaming fans on a brand-new turf field.

Even though the Tigers have been able to practice on the field throughout the summer, it added an extra special something to their energy level before the game.

“It’s been a great thing for us,” varsity head coach Chris Crabtree said. “It’s lifted the whole team’s morale in general, you can just tell. ... The kids seem to be a lot more excited.”

But the varsity football squad is not the only team who benefits from the new field.

Varsity soccer teams, junior high school football teams, the track and field team, even the pee-wee football teams are all able to use the field because of its multipurpose design. And the more the field is used, the better its condition becomes.

The mono-filament turf material more closely resembles blades of grass. Josh Hobbs, the school board president, said the turf is the first of its kind to be laid in the U.S.

The turf is just one of the many updates and improvements made to the Waverly athletic facility. In under two years, the stadium has undergone almost a complete makeover.

The old concrete bleachers on both the home and visitors side were condemned. They had to be replaced out of concern for public safety, and fast.

To add to the stress, athletic director Bo Arnett said that, at last year’s season opener, the school had to borrow spare seating from wherever they could, and the visiting team was asked to bring lawn chairs in to compensate for the lack of visitors bleachers. Though he said he felt bad asking them to do that, it was all about safety.

With both sets of bleachers finally replaced, the turf was the final aspect of the stadium to come together. Arnett, Hobbs, and superintendent Ed Dickens all spoke of the “terrible” conditions of the grass field before the turf was installed.

“The field had dropped 21/2 feet and exposed draining pipes,” Hobbs said. “There was way too much traffic on the field.”

In the past, the school had been putting what Dickens called “expensive Band-Aids” on the problematic field conditions. Reseeding was expensive, and the grass would last only a few weeks before the amount of field use tore it up completely.

Flooding also was an issue, only worsening the conditions for growing grass seed.

The field had gotten so bad by the end of last fall, Dickens said, that they had to move their final two home soccer matches to a neighboring school’s field.

For Arnett, the addition of a turf field is more than just the reliability of a consistent playing and practice field for all sports; it also creates a little less dirty work for him. Arnett was used to mowing and striping the old grass field on a regular basis.

Now that things are more permanent and require less maintenance, Arnett can catch a break and let more teams practice and play on the new field than before.

With luck, they hope to get 15 years of good use out of the new turf and see many victories in the new facility.