A lawn at the top: Tech’s field gets high grades

Atlanta United players praise speedy surface, staff’s attention to detail.

Atlanta United, one of the fastest teams in MLS, has a home track to match. The expansion team speeds about Bobby Dodd Stadium on a surface that is pool-table flat and shaved close to the league-minimum length.

“I think it’s a really great field,” said midfielder Kevin Kratz, who has played the majority of his career on the manicured pitches of Germany. “They had to renew it before the Houston game, but because it was wet, it was very good. It was fast. Compared to German fields, there is nearly no difference.”

Its caretaker is Chris May, Georgia Tech’s chief groundskeeper, whose primary job is making sure that Tech football coach Paul Johnson and baseball coach Danny Hall have no complaints about their playing surfaces. In the past year, though, May and his staff have taken on the considerable challenge of babying Grant Field through a hectic football season and then keeping it green and healthy through spring practice and Atlanta United’s first three games at the stadium before tearing it up and putting down a new Bermuda grass carpet two weeks ago.

Among the successes of Atlanta United’s debut season — the Sunday home match against New York

City FC will be the team’s fifth consecutive home sellout, and Atlanta United’s 24 goals lead the league — one of the less celebrated is the work by May and his staff to give Bobby Dodd Stadium’s tenants a near-flawless playing field.

“First-class,” Argentine forward Hector Villalba said through an interpreter. “From the moment you walk into the locker room to the field, everything is top of the line.”

The effort has required a bit more than a weekly mow and paint job. May, 33, a Lassiter High grad, has been planning the logistics of Atlanta United’s temporary residence for about a year. The implementation has required the all-in support of May’s four-person staff (not counting the two caretakers of Tech’s golf practice facility).

It has needed the skill, detail and passion of someone who said he has been on campus daily since Jan. 22, usually working 14-hour days.

“Chris May works his rear end off,” Hall said. “Just the challenge of our field, football, all the stuff going on in Bobby Dodd Stadium with Atlanta United. His plate has been more than full, but he’s just a tremendous grounds guy, no question.”

That included planning for a rye-grass overseeding during the football season because the Bermuda grass goes dormant in cool weather.

“Anything I could do to put lipstick on a pig,” May said.

May and his staff were doing this with turf, installed after the stadium hosted the Rolling Stones in July 2015, that was subpar. But the field has been vibrant green and played true.

Because the rye grass seeding was so heavy, it meant the Bermuda grass couldn’t come back adequately in time for football, which necessitated a new field.

“Everybody keeps asking, ‘I can’t believe we tore the field out. It was great,’” May said. “I’m like, it was going to die in a month. It couldn’t have handled the heat.”

The installation itself was a feat. After peeling off about 3 inches of turf and dirt from the field’s sand base, May added about 330 tons of sand, which was tilled and graded. Then there were the shipments of sod — Latitude 36, a state-of the-art turf — that came in 30 deliveries on 18-wheeler flat-bed trucks May 15-16 from Precision Turf ’s Braselton sod farm.

May has gone the extra mile, studying Atlanta United’s playing style to conclude that a faster surface would better suit the team. The grass is cut between a halfinch and five-eighths of an inch. The league mandates grass to be between a halfinch to 1¼ inches.

He has checked with players to make sure that the field has been watered enough — soccer players like the blades of grass wet so the ball slides across the turf. He typically gives the field a heavy watering early on game days to moisten the field for good footing, then sprinkles it right before pregame warmups, again when the team goes back to the locker room and one final time at halftime.

May’s staff has responded with long hours and taken few days off during the busiest time of the year, when baseball, softball, spring football and track are all competing for attention. They’re working, too, with the complexities of an urban campus with restricted space and an athletic department without money to burn. But the reward comes in compliments from world-class soccer players, congratulatory text messages from colleagues and the pride in showing off your handiwork to a sellout crowd.

‘Compared to German fields, there is nearly no difference.’ Kevin Kratz, Atlanta United midfielder