Thank you, Man U

Published 4:47 pm Thursday, July 21, 2011

Two years ago, when Archbishop Murphy played host to the Cedarcrest High School football team on a rain-soaked evening, Wildcats athletic director Rick Stubrud had bigger concerns than whether his school could maintain Cascade Conference supremacy.

“We thought kids were literally going to dr

own out there,” Stubrud said.

Stubrud was exaggerating. Wasn’t he? If you’ve seen pictures or video from that 2009 game, you know he wasn’t exaggerating by much.

Now, thanks in part to an English soccer team’s decision to tour the U.S., the Wildcats can breathe easy knowing that, well, even face down on their field on a rainy night, they’ll be able to breathe. That’s because the old football field at Archbishop Murphy is being replaced by the sod that was used for the Sounders FC vs. Manchester United soccer game played Wednesday night at CenturyLink Field in Seattle.

On Thursday, trucks carrying roughly two acres of sod from Seattle to Everett started the process of turning CenturyLink’s temporary playing surface into a permanent one at Archbishop Murphy.

The top clubs in Europe aren’t willing to play on artificial surfaces, which is why Sounders FC brought in the temporary surface for the Man U game. Seattle did the same thing in 2009 when Chelsea and Barcelona came to town.

“For these massive games, we pull out all the stops and brought in the sod,” Sounders FC general manager Adrian Hanauer said.

Hanauer estimated the cost at roughly $150,000, though James Schneider, CEO of JB Instant Lawn, the company that did the installation, said the number was “slightly less” than that figure. Once the game is played, however, all of that grass has to go somewhere, and whenever possible, the team, which already paid for the grass, and JB Instant Lawn, prefer the sod find a permanent home rather than return to the company’s Woodinville facility.

“It’s what we prefer, and it’s what they prefer as well, because it’s great grass,” Schneider said. “The challenge is that you have to have the site ready, because it can’t sit. … We try to get it to go to a site, because there’s a lot of schools out there that don’t have the money to redo a field. The Sounders have already purchased the sod, so everybody benefits, the community benefits.”

Deciding where the grass goes requires a few steps. First & Goal Inc., which operates CenturyLink Field, surveys schools and athletic clubs around the region to determine need. The more complicated part is finding a deserving recipient who is also ready to take the field, because once the sod is rolled up and put on trucks, it has to be laid down again almost immediately.

A member of Archbishop Murphy’s board of trustees happened to know John Wright, the director of facilities and fields at First & Goal, and that led to a discussion about possibly getting the sod from Sounders FC.

“It was more just having a lucky break,” Stubrud said. “Just through that relationship, they struck up a conversation, and John said, ‘We’ve got Manchester United coming in and we’ll put down sod, and we’ll need to get rid of it afterward.'”

And while the grass is already purchased by Sounders FC, saving an estimated $80,000 to $100,000 according to Stubrud, this was still a big investment for Archbishop Murphy. Simply putting down fresh sod on the old field wouldn’t solve the problems that led to sloppy field conditions in the past, so the school brought in D.A. Hogan, a consulting, engineering and landscape architecture firm, as well as Premier Field Development, a Lake Stevens-based company, to install proper drainage.

“The big thing was, we had to make a decision of, ‘Well, we don’t just want to put it down and have the same problems we’ve had before,'” Stubrud said. “So the most significant part of what we’ve done is put a professional drainage system in. We had to really make a financial decision from that end to support the gift by putting down the proper foundation.”

To let the sod set in properly, Stubrud said the team won’t practice on the field in August. And with a better field that should hold up to the abuse of a football season, the boys soccer team should be able to use the field again in the spring, something that hasn’t been an option in recent years. For the soccer team, that means playing on the same field where, for a night anyway, Manchester United worked its magic; the same field where Wayne Rooney scored three goals in a span of 21 minutes.

Said Stubrud: “That’s really cool, absolutely.”

Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.