The Cascia Hall facility is a great example of how an organization can use a manufacturer’s resources to its advantage.
By Nicole Achs Freeling
FieldTurf engineers have extensive experience dealing with drainage and runoff issues surrounding the company’s patented brand of artificial turf — that expertise was put to the test with a project for Cascia Hall Preparatory School in Tulsa.
The K-12 private school hosted 50 games a year on its grass football field — and the surface was usually a swamp of mud by the last few games of the season, said Roger Carter, Cascia Hall athletic director. With the costs of the field, including seed, paint, and maintenance, amounting to $50,000 a year, school officials decided it would make sense to replace the grass with a FieldTurf artificial surface.
Unfortunately, the area has a history of catastrophic flooding along the Arkansas River and the creeks that feed into it. Cascia Hall, as project directors discovered once the project was underway, sat at the bottom of one of those flood plains. As such, the area was subject to restrictions under the Tulsa Stormwater Management Plan, considered to be the strictest flood control district in the country.
“Flood control officials had a mistrust of artificial turf dating back to the AstroTurf days,” said Mark Wills, FieldTurf regional sales representative. “Furthermore, Cascia Hall’s grass field had served as a run-off basin for the neighborhood. To obtain the required permit, engineers would have to develop a system that would meet rigorous flood control standards and win the confidence of skeptical officials. The field would have to be designed based on 100-year flood calculations, compared to two to ten years as is the norm.”
Cascia Hall had retained FieldTurf to deliver the project on a design-build basis, so the company was able to bring in its most seasoned professionals.
The design called for the creation of an underground detention system that would regulate the flow of water both entering and exiting the field. It involved a system of underground pipes that were baffled at the end, to release a certain amount of water over time. The plan won city officials over.
“They were amazed we could do it,” Wills said. “They gave us their wholehearted stamp of approval.”
Had Cascia Hall simply contracted FieldTurf to install the field, it would have had to call in outside designers and engineers, who did not have the experience in these kinds of surfaces. “They would have spent a whole lot of money, and they might not have been able to come up with a design that worked,” Wills said.
The project encountered an additional challenge — the summer it was installed ended up being the wettest summer season in the history of Oklahoma. “Out of a stretch of 46 days, there were 42 days of rain,” Wills said. Thanks in part to the efficiencies of design-build, FieldTurf was able to overcome the setback to complete the stadium as planned and have it ready for the first home game of the season.
“We use it every single day, and yet it looks brand new,” said Cascia Hall Athletic Director Roger Carter. “The players love the fact that it’s always in perfect condition. They like the traction; they like the comfort. They say it’s like playing on a college field.”
