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A key player in this year's World Cup is underfoot - literally. It is the field. Usually, professional soccer games in the U.S. are played on either natural or artificial grass. But for these games, FIFA has commissioned a special type of pitch made from both. KNKX's Izzy Ross has our story.
IZZY ROSS, BYLINE: On a clear spring night, a crew of teens and young adults gather on Desert Green Turf farm in Washington state. They're getting ready to harvest the grass for the World Cup stadium in Seattle. Long strips of sod almost 4 feet wide have already been cut. A tractor revs up to help roll them. People follow behind curling the strips into fat spirals of dirt and grass.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRACTOR ENGINE)
UNIDENTIFIED FARM WORKER: Good.
ROSS: They're harvesting through the night to prevent the grass from getting overheated when it's compacted like this. It'll be shipped in refrigerated trucks for the Seattle matches. These fields are almost all natural grass, which is often preferred by players. But they also have a small amount of synthetic blades. FIFA says that helps to withstand a lot of foot traffic. There are two ways to make these fields. One, a big sewing machine stitches artificial grass into the natural field. Two, farmers seed natural grass onto a carpet with artificial blades.
KURTIS COX: So you can't even tell that the artificial's down there now.
ROSS: That's one of the farm owners, Kurtis Cox.
COX: If you get down and start pulling on these, every so often you'll get on a piece that won't rip, and that's the artificial pieces that are in there.
ROSS: Cox says this kind of grass requires more work, grading so it's perfectly level and using a big machine to clean debris out from between the blades.
TREY ROGERS: This is not something sod farmers typically do.
ROSS: Trey Rogers, a professor of turf grass research at Michigan State University, is part of a team hired by FIFA to work on the World Cup grass. He says a major challenge was how to get these grass fields to thrive in a huge range of climates and conditions, indoor and outdoor venues spread across the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
ROGERS: I mean, 16 stadiums across three countries, half of the stadiums don't have natural grass in them ever.
ROSS: They had to figure out which species would thrive in each climate and how to care for them. That included measuring, watering and getting the grass light in shady stadiums. FIFA's goal is for each pitch to feel the same to play on, or as close as possible. And that matters because players say the field affects them and the ball.
ROGERS: If they can't predict how the ball's going to bounce or how it's going to roll or how smooth it's going to be, now we've got a problem.
ROSS: A problem did seem to crop up last year when FIFA used this type of field for a club tournament in the U.S. One coach criticized it as dry and bouncy. Another player said it wasn't bouncy enough. FIFA wouldn't address those specific comments but says those games were a dress rehearsal for this World Cup, where the fields will have custom infrastructure and more time to be installed. Lu Barnes, a former defender for the Seattle Reign, says natural grass can be safer for athletes.
LU BARNES: Playing on turf is a lot harder on your, like, knees, ankles and joints. So the impact of that is just not as natural.
ROSS: Barnes is a soccer ambassador with the local World Cup committee. She played on a hybrid field in Sweden, which she says was able to stand up to harsh weather, and she says it felt good.
BARNES: You would never be able to tell. It definitely felt like a natural grass.
ROSS: After the World Cup wraps up in July, some turf experts will be watching to see if more hybrid fields come to the U.S. For NPR News, I'm Izzy Ross in Seattle.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADANNA DURU SONG, "POP!") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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