Posted: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:59 AM - 14,553 Readers
By: Rick Cantu
photography by Jay Janner
The athletic fields at Liberty Hill High School are so parched, Panthers football coach Jerry Vance compared them to the Sahara Desert.
"I swear I saw two camels walk across our fields looking for water," the dry-witted Vance said Monday.
While Vance can joke about his school's playing surface of scorched Bermuda grass and dirt, the devastating drought is no laughing matter for Central Texas schools trying to irrigate their fields. Although many area schools have installed artificial turf in recent years, many others still rely on rain to keep alive their natural grass fields.
The rains that drenched much of the area this past weekend came about two months too late for Smithville, which has given up watering one of its two practice fields. It's difficult enough keeping the stadium field and one practice field sufficiently watered, Tigers football coach Justin Wiley said.
"One of the practice fields has become so dry, there are cracks in the surface that are two or three inches wide," he said. "We joke with our freshmen that they have to use the buddy system when crossing the field in case someone gets lost in the cracks."
To help preserve the stadium field and one playable practice field, Smithville canceled youth football games involving roughly 300 kids from several area counties, Wiley said.
The combination of record heat — 90 days above 100 degrees in Austin this year — and lack of rainfall have created playing conditions coaches like Wiley and Vance have never seen.
Lake Travis, the rare Class 4A high school that still plays on a grass field, has seen its water bill rise in the face of stifling heat. From May through September, water usage at Cavalier Stadium rose 68 percent compared to the same period last year. The cost for water over the five-month period was $10,135, up from $6,020 in 2010, said district spokesman Marco Alvarado. He added that Lake Travis has no plans to install artificial turf on its football fields.
Other school districts, including Austin, Round Rock, Leander, Eanes, Georgetown, Dripping Springs, Hays and New Braunfels, avoid irrigation costs because their schools play football on synthetic turf.
The Austin school district ditched its natural grass fields at Burger Stadium, Nelson Field and House Park in favor of artificial surfaces, starting in 2006. The switch cost about $600,000 per field.
Tommy Cox, athletics director for Austin ISD, said water conservation was a "big factor" in the switch to artificial turf.
The annual cost of maintaining one stadium's natural grass football field was about $15,000 a year, Cox said, factoring in irrigation, fertilizer, herbicide treatments and labor. In contrast, it costs about $3,000 annually to maintain one of those fields today with the artificial turf.
"Installing artificial turf at our stadiums has been a win-win situation," Cox said. "Our kids have a safer place to play, and it ends up costing less than a natural turf stadium."
For smaller schools such as Lexington, Liberty Hill and Smithville, though, installing artificial turf fields might be financially prohibitive. Instead, coaches at those schools and others may hope that the Austin area soon sees a repeat of September 2010, a month that saw five inches of rainfall.
St. Michael's Catholic Academy, which uses water from an underground well to irrigate its grass athletic fields, is considering a switch to artificial turf, said football coach Ed McCabe, who's also the school's athletic director.
"It would actually be of greater benefit for our winter and spring sports (soccer and lacrosse), as the field is pretty worn by mid-January," McCabe wrote in an email. "Plus you do not lose practice days due to rain (not this year) ... I think it would be a good upgrade. Additionally, there are considerable costs to upkeep natural grass from year to year."
Especially this year.
