Winter Sports
The Busch Stadium is the home of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. The iconic stadium had never hosted anything other than baseball so, when Chelsea and Manchester City were scheduled in to play an exhibition game, it was all hands to the pump to prepare a football pitch worthy of their talents
With our editorial team having converted sod to turf and soccer to football, Steve Bush, President of Bush Sports Turf explains how his team, with assistance from the stadium’s ground crew and Chelsea’s Head
Groundsman, Jason Griffin, beat about the Busch!
Steve Bush I
never imagined that, in my lifetime, I would have the privilege of doing the first ‘soccer’ pitch at Busch Stadium in St. Louis for a crowd of more than 48,000 fans. Yet, that is
exactly what happened back in May. Busch Stadium hosted two of the most famous teams in English Premier League football, Chelsea and Manchester City. It was a sellout crowd for the first non- baseball sporting events held at Busch Stadium since the venue opened in 2006. There were 48,263 fans in attendance, which is the largest crowd to ever attend a sporting event at the stadium. 58 PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013
Diamonds aren’t forever!
Bush Sports Turf was chosen to collaborate with Busch Stadium head groundskeeper, Billy Findley, and vice president of stadium operations, Joe Abernathy, to convert the stadium from a baseball field to a football pitch - and then back to a baseball field - in a six day timeframe.
Our mission was to squeeze a 100m x 65m football pitch into Busch Stadium. It would require removing the pitcher’s mound and infield clay, and turfing these areas, along with the four corners of the field, which would be on the warning track (see inset), and then quickly
turning the pitch back to a baseball field. There was a forecast for scattered thunderstorms on every day leading up to the match, so immediately after the Cardinals played an afternoon game on 19th May, Billy Findley and his crew removed all of the conditioner from the infield dirt and covered the infield with a tarpauline. Without any extra time to work with, it was critical that the dirt not get saturated. With 48,000 fans attending the Thursday game, the field simply had to be ready. To throw us a curveball, the organisers added an exhibition practice session to
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