Artificial Grass Is Already Standard For Hockey Pitches – Will Other Sports Follow?

There are various benefits to investing in artificial grass, including reduced water use and maintenance time. As such, many sectors have already embraced the versatility that artificial grass provides, thanks to generalised benefits like it being easy to clean, keeping indoor areas clear of dirt, and looking good all year round. 

One area where debate still rages, however, is in the sports world, where real grass remains the standard for most outdoor field-based sports, despite it being commonplace in indoor sporting varieties. An outlier is hockey, which formalised the use of artificial grass years ago. In fact, artificial grass is so commonplace in hocky that it’s unusual for even school-level hockey players to play on anything other than artificial turf. 

The popularity of artificial grass for this particular sport is based on a number of factors, including, primarily, that it allows for a far more even playing surface. This means that players have greater ball control and are less susceptible to the same kinds of injuries that generally occur during a game as the result of damage from hockey sticks and so forth to the ground. Artificial turf is also more predictable, which means that players playing at one venue one week and another the next do not have to adapt their style as much as they would when navigating the differences present in natural turf. One final benefit is that it’s possible to play on artificial turf in just about any weather without worrying about the damage posed to the field or players.

As other sports begin to more seriously consider how things like climate change might impact their games going forward and the fields on which they play, artificial turf may well become standardised in the same way it already has in hockey.