Articles
Stormwater Management Takes The Field
Many parks, recreation, and athletic facilities serve as community hubs where residents gather to compete, play, socialize, and enjoy the outdoors. These prized community assets can play an even bigger role by incorporating infrastructure to manage stormwater, mitigate flooding, and achieve water-quality goals.
Calculating Demand
Park planning has become increasingly data-driven in recent years. For instance, the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) collects and analyzes a high volume and variety of data to prepare major plans and studies, with key examples including the 2016 Parks Needs Assessment (PNA), Community Parks and Recreation Plans (CPRP) for the most park-poor communities, and the 2022 Parks Needs Assessment Plus (PNA+).
Play Up Social Opportunities
One of the great advantages of sports is they bring people together. Let’s face it—it’s just plain fun to catch up with friends, whether watching kids in Little League or finishing a great game of pickleball or tennis and wanting to unwind and talk.
Premier Sports Complexes
So, you have built a premier sports complex. How do you make it pay? By keeping it busy every day.
Sports Field Management Association Announces 2023 'Stars and Stripes' Contest Winners
Sports Field Management Association (SFMA) – the non-profit, professional association for men and women who manage sports fields worldwide – announces the students of the Atlee High School Turf Science Program in Mechanicsville, Virginia have won the association’s "Stars and Stripes" contest for the second straight year.
Want Big Results?
Wildly popular at the youth level, soccer and lacrosse are big tournament draws. One of the most successful formats—and one seeing tremendous growth—is small-sided play.
Field Of Play
It’s easy to host. It’s affordable to maintain. There are plenty of potential players. And it’s hot and growing and can bring a younger demographic into your park.
Quidditch And Ultimate
These are not your father’s sports. Or your mom’s, come to think of it, and they’d probably cause extreme confusion for plenty of other generations.
Youth-Sports Administration 101: Preventative Field Maintenance
Whether you own and operate sports facilities or have a user-group agreement, you still have the responsibility to ensure those facilities are safe and last the test of time. Maintaining them properly is the key.
A Legacy Reborn
Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation reopened the iconic American Legion Memorial Stadium (ALMS) with a small ceremony on July 7, 2021. The $40.5-million stadium—located in Charlotte, North Carolina’s center city, on a 9.80-acre site adjacent to the main campus of Central Piedmont Community College—was built during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program of the New Deal.
Slugging Through Maintenance
As parks administrators—and parents—know all too well, children are plugged into electronic devices and tuned out of “live” action for too many hours in the day. The quintessential childhood experience of running out the back door and spending the day outside has largely disappeared, as have other critical developmental processes: group socialization, physical fitness, competition, and just plain play.
A Refresher Course
In the last 20 years, I have been called countless times to lend advice to an athletic field manager, school custodian, or school board member who wanted a “better” field for the athletes. After a few conversations with similar answers, I realized many people were forgetting the basic steps needed to properly maintain athletic fields.
Field Of Study
The old axiom, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” might be appropriate for almost any sports field this time of year. With play returning and athletes absolutely determined to make up for lost time, it’s not surprising fields aren’t looking their best.
Painting With Robots
In January 2019, Manatee County (Fla.) moved into the 21st century of field painting with its first GPS, robotic field-painting robot. It was purchased for the Premier Sports Campus (PSC), a 75-acre, natural-turf facility that brings in high-level clients and tournaments, such as U.S. Soccer, the USL Showcase, and the Developmental Academy Showcase, to name a few.
Synthetic Turf
More than 8,000 multi-use, synthetic-turf fields are in play today at North American K-12 schools, colleges, parks, and professional sports stadiums, according to the Synthetic Turf Council. This trend reflects a growing desire to invest in surfaces that are safe for athletes, are durable over time, and require minimal maintenance.
Showing The Colors
Editor’s Note: This column, “LBWA” (Leadership By Wandering Around), is based on the premise that, in order to find out what’s going on in the field, a parks and rec leader has to leave his or her des
On The Surface
It is likely that many of us learned to play basketball and tennis on asphalt, with that sensation of feet baking in our shoes. With the inception of the first asphalt-paved road in 1868, and the
Weathering Winter
Staff reduction, inclement weather and a decrease in visitor traffic make the winter season a challenging, but ideal, time for park maintenance. Across the country, parks and recreation departments
Major League Maintenance
The city of Goodyear, Ariz., hit a homerun in 2009 with the addition of the Goodyear Park and Recreation Complex. The new facility is the spring training home for two Major League Baseball teams, the
Get A Grip On Rubber Flooring
Landfills full of used tires are becoming a thing of the past. Now, manufacturers and recyclers are finding a number of uses for discarded tires, such as horse stall and trailer mats, flooring in pet