With over 31,000 students at N.C. State, there are not enough varsity or club teams to meet the needs of students who wish to play some type of sport. Luckily, the school has an excellent group of intramural sports that offers a wide variety of sports including flag football, volleyball, basketball, soccer, softball and many others.
The campus recreation staff does a great job organizing the sports and allowing the most teams possible to include as many students that want to play as possible. However, the intramural process has a few flaws to it.
For many people, including myself, intramural sports are kind of a big deal. Students have played a sport or two in high school, but we either did not have the ability or did not want to try to play at a higher level. So, playing intramural sports is the closest we get to an actual game environment, and most people that play look forward to that one hour a week in which they get to play their game.
But hopes for outdoor games quickly diminish if rain or even heavy dew is in the forecast. Do not get me wrong, the Miller Intramural Fields are great and give the students an excellent place to go out and play, but when a rain comes the fields are shut down for days. I know Mother Nature has her own agenda and we cannot fight when it rains, but we can limit the damage the rain does to the fields.
The problem is the fact that the fields do not drain well and many spots on the fields get only a couple of hours of sunlight due to the shade from trees. This makes the fields only really dry up in a drought. Thus, the fields get shut down, and games get cancelled and players can only hope that they get made up.
With rain also comes slippery conditions on the fields, which increases the chances for injury. Because of the increase in risk, the IM staff closes the field. I agree with them that they should, but the amount of time the field stays closed could be decreased with one simple fix.
The fix would be that we opted to have the intramural fields changed from grass fields to field turf. By doing this, the fields would be safer in the rain and would also dry quicker. Also, field turf would need less maintenance. Because the field would be turf and not grass, it would not need to be mowed, tilled, seeded and kept up. Instead, just put it down and tend it to every once in a while.
Field turf does everything that grass fields do but without the maintenance. 21 of 32 NFL teams use field turf in their stadiums and the Super Bowl and BCS National Championship games have both been played on it.
Having field turf on the intramural fields would also help to keep the field even and limit the number of dirt spots on the field where the grass has been destroyed due to the amount of activity on it. By the end of the year in the spring, the fields are barely grass anymore and are instead a mixture of mud, dirt, rock, sand, clay and a tiny bit of grass. By having field turf, we could 100 percent fix this problem. It would help make and keep the fields smoother and safer for the students and faculty that use it.
I know the measure would be costly, but for the most part, it would be a onetime cost. Other schools, such as UNC Chapel Hill, have field turf for their intramural fields and the advantages for the students are great. And so I ask, why not use some of the money that we are being forced to spending on Talley, which most of us will never get to use, and instead use it to put field turf on the IM fields to help make intramural games be played a lot more often and on a better surface?
