New Dallas Cowboy Stadium will wow fans
3 Dec, 2008 Athletic Turf NewsARLINGTON, TX — If you've never sat through a Browns football game in December in the freezing rain at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and felt the cold of the concrete beneath your boots (double socks or not) creep up your legs like a frigid anaconda, you probably can't fully appreciate what's rising up in Arlington TX -- the new Dallas Cowboy stadium.
Mammoth Cleveland Municipal is just a memory, its 64-year reign on Cleveland's windswept lakefront coming to an end with its demolition in 1995 and its replacement with open-air, natural-turf Browns Stadium in 1999. And yes, the snow and wind still whip in off of Lake Erie and make NFL football in November and December a chilly experience at the site.
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But, how bot dem Cowboys, eh?
Apart from the New York Yankees, what other team is ready to plunk down a cool $1 billion for a new stadium, in this case $1.1 billion. For that price, the stadium better get lots of use, and it looks like it will. It's already being touted as perhaps "the most used stadium ever built." In addition to being the home field for the NFL Cowboys, the Stadium, designed by HKS Architects, is going to host the 2011 Super Bowl, the 2010 AT&T Cotton Bowl, the 2010 NBA All-Star Game, the 2014 NCAA men's Final Four basketball tournament, maybe even World Cup soccer and NCAA lacrosse.
The retractable roof stadium will have three different Matrix synthetic fields from SportsField for three different sports -- one for the Cowboys, one for college football and one for soccer. The Matrix trademarked field is an advanced version of the RealGrass surface that the Cowboys have played on at Texas Stadium the past eight years.
"This is the only stadium in the NFL that has the option to have as many different kinds of fields as they want and can change out for every event," said Reed J. Seaton, CEO of Hellas Construction, which is installing the fields.
The new field is unique in several other ways, including its "roll-up" design. The field can be rolled up in strips and stored under staging areas along the sidelines at field level. In other words, one field can be rolled up and another laid down, reportedly within a day's time.
The Stadium, which will seat 80,000, with the possibility of expansion to 100,000, is to be done in August, and the Cowboys will play its first home game there in September. Although the Stadium is yet to sell naming rights, some folks are referring to it as "Jerry World," in reference to team owner Jerry Jones.
It replaces Texas Stadium, which opened in 1971, as the Cowboys home.
Click here to see an audio/visual of explaining the Stadium's fields.
"Dallas Cowboys' new stadium to feature three separate synthetic fields," The Dallas Morning News, Dec. 2
"Austin firm gets Cowboys turf deal," Austin Statesman, Dec. 3
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