KC is in for some cold days ahead. Sporting KC’s new field is ready like never before
A snowstorm hit Kansas City last week, nearly half a foot of flakes falling to the ground and then blanketed with ice. Fewer than 48 hours before Sporting Kansas City’s season opener, Dan Lolli arrived at Children’s Mercy Park before 7 a.m., eager to find out how much work he had ahead of him.
Lolli, the club’s vice president of operations who oversees the field, saw a clean playing surface. The snow and ice were gone. The grass remained green.
How?
Sporting KC installed a new heating system this winter, powered by electric ribbon, which the club believes is the first of its kind in American professional sports.
“It’s been incredible,” Lolli said. “It’s working perfectly. As you can see, this is beautiful.”
Nearly 25 miles of electric ribbon lines the underbelly of the playing surface. In the United States, Lolli says only a couple of college baseball fields use an identical system. It’s more popular in Europe. NFL and MLS teams are already calling, wondering how it’s working.
The Kansas City Chiefs installed a $2.2-million heating system under Arrowhead Stadium a few years ago, which included pipes run from a boiler room. The boilers heat up water that runs through the pipes.
Sporting KC’s new system, which required a multi-million dollar investment, per sources, is monitored through a phone app. The field is broken into nine quadrants, each of which has a temperature setting. That was a selling point for Sporting KC, considering some portions of its field see a lot more sunlight during the day than others.
Sporting KC used the heating system throughout last week in preparation for its season opener against Toluca in the CONCACAF Champions League. Sporting KC won the match 3-0.
“It came down to the bookends of the season,” team president and CEO Jake Reid said. “We want to be in Champions League every year, and we want to be hosting playoff matches every year. We play our most critical matches at the start of the year and the end of the year. The high standard that we have here, this was the right thing to do.”
The temperature hovered just above freezing for the opener last week. Sporting KC will next return home on March 10, and the current forecast in Kansas City is for the month to begin with 10 straight days below 40 degrees, three of them with snow.
The franchise has also purchased grow lights that sit on top of a tarp, a concept other MLS teams use. Essentially, the electric ribbon heats the soil and therefore the field, while the grow lights serve as sunlight for the grass.
“We really feel like we’ve mitigated mother nature as much as we can,” Lolli said.
When Sporting KC played host to Portland in last year’s Western Conference semifinals, the field was cold and hard. When the venue hosted the MLS Cup in 2013, Sporting KC and Real Salt Lake players were sliding on a surface that had turned to ice.
Theoretically, those days should be gone.
“We’re really excited because guys can cut without having to worry about slipping and sliding and that stuff,” Lolli said. “It will be a more safe playing field and a more consistent one, too. We want them to come out tomorrow, July, August and it’s always the same.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2019 at 11:41 AM with the headline "KC is in for some cold days ahead. Sporting KC’s new field is ready like never before."