Rogers Centre rolls out green carpet for TFC
Toronto FC is covering new ground Wednesday night: their match against the Los Angeles Galaxy is their first at the Rogers Centre. The actual ground they’re covering — not the stadium’s usual baseball turf — is also newly-installed: this time last week, the pitch was mere concrete. It took 25 workers 36 hours to lay down the soccer playing surface late last week. The temporary lines demarcating the field were painted on Sunday, just in time for Toronto FC’S first practice there on Monday. The whirlwind installation seems like a daunting task. But for Frank Grespan, who’s been the director of conversions at the dome since before the stadium was built, it’s all part of the job. “It takes months and months of planning, actually,” he said. “The average fan out there doesn’t understand the work that goes in.” Rogers Centre has nine full-time workers who operate the hydraulically-powered equipment needed to convert the stadium between sports. Especially for this match, 16 more temporary workers were brought in to first tape down granulated rubber to the concrete, to soften the playing surface. “(Toronto FC’S) coaching staff probably felt that the turf itself was a little bit too hard on the concrete, so they wanted to soften it up a little bit,” Grespan said. The surface also features silica sand, which gives the rubber its weight.
Stadium staff then put a stiff layer of plastic on top of the rubber so that they could slide turf rolls on top together perfectly, without any seams between them. The turf surface is made up of 50 separate rolls, which weigh between 8,000 and 11,000 pounds depending on length.
The turf panels were installed one at a time because the crew’s heavy machinery couldn’t travel across the rubber underlay without destroying it. After three twelve-hour shifts from Wednesday through Friday, the field was set.
The artificial turf is three years old, and the same surface the CFL’S Argonauts play on. It’s been used for European soccer games in the past at the dome.
And despite the gruelling shift work, it’s still easier than installing the turf for Jays games, Grespan said. “It’s a lot easier, in the sense that you’re just working with a rectangle. Baseball’s diamond shape gives us different lengths of turf.”
Immediately after Wednesday’s match, the same crew will descend to remove the surface in time for Spring Fling, the annual carnival which starts on March 10.