Greener grass: Why artificial turf has become so popular in Butler County in the last 25 years
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
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Seneca Valley High School's turf football field is seen on Friday, July 11, 2025. Morgan Phillips/Butler Eagle
What was once a singularity in Butler County is now the norm.
Karns City was the first high school in the area to install an artificial turf athletic field, having done so around the turn of the century. Today, Moniteau and Summit Academy are the only local schools left without an all-weather playing surface for their football teams.
Artificial turf allows for the chance for teams to play no matter how much it rains, snows or sleets. The surface is smoother and has more give than grass, and doesn’t require the same daily maintenance costs as a grass field.
Knoch is the most recent to lay out a turf football field, which opened for use in 2023. North Catholic used J.C. Stone Field last season.
“There were times on the grass (in) the spring that we’d have to keep people off of it,” said Knoch athletic director Josh Shoop, who served in the same position from 2003-13 before returning last year. “Youth football, I think our girls and boys soccer teams, when I had left, they each had four games on the grass field, and then the other games were on the back grass field, just to try to save the grass for the football games.”
Shoop added teams couldn’t practice on that field before. The stadium is now open to the public. Laundry costs have dipped and team uniforms hold up longer, plus there are scheduling benefits.
“From a weather standpoint, we reschedule far less games now,” said Seneca Valley athletic director Heather Lewis. “Because it can rain all day — literally all day — but if it’s not raining at 4 p.m., we can play a baseball, softball game, a lacrosse game.”
Cost is also a factor. Butler resurfaced the field at Art Bernardi Stadium in 2021, athletic director Bill Mylan said, at a projected cost of $460,000 when it was approved in 2019. Mylan, said depending on use, the new turf will last 10-12 years.
“The cost is half of whatever a turf field is because you already have the drainage in there, which is one of the more expensive things,” Mylan said.
Shoop estimated installation of new turf fields costs between $1-2 million. Replacing the turf brings that down to $500,000 or so.
When Lewis took over for the Raiders, Seneca Valley’s baseball field was grass with a dirt infield.
“To me, it was becoming very dangerous because the more you would run the machine around the dirt, you would develop a lip,” Lewis said. “The more you’d do that, the greater that lip becomes. And, now, all of a sudden, the dirt was becoming higher than the grass, so now my shortstop is having to back up ... and there becomes a natural drop in step.”
The same sort of safety issues presented themselves in the outfield, with slight level differences affecting play.
Title IX considerations were also a factor. The Raiders’ boys and girls lacrosse teams track and field team had to share the football field for practice and competition each spring.
Lewis and Seneca Valley decided the best long-term investment for the school district was to install turf fields for baseball and softball, as well as a soccer/lacrosse stadium, now known as Myers Law Group Stadium.
Seneca Valley’s football stadium was resurfaced in 2017. When the school’s aquatics center was built in 2022, a grass field behind Ryan Gloyer Middle School was destroyed while being used as a construction staging area. Turf was then installed at that location, which is now used as a practice field
For Seneca Valley, the use extends outside of the school district’s athletic programs.
“We have a number of outside groups that use our facilities, so there’s a community interest in what we’ve done,” Lewis said. “It generates revenue for the district, and we put that back into the facilities.”
