Lines in the Sand
Sports turf takes root even amid harsh desert.
Mark A. Heinlein of Motz Group saw the dead grass on about a quarter of the soccer field in Al Sadd stadium in Qatar late last year and realized it was a worst case situation.
The Arabian Cup soccer games were just a week away. And Heinlein, senior vice president of the Newtown-based high-performance turf company, knew it was unlikely the turf experts from Motz (rhymes with boats) could restore this shady side of the field in time using conventional restoration methods.
Even with virtually unlimited funds from Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, amir of Qatar. Even with a tractor that actually started. Even with a grounds crew that did not spread fertilizer as if they were feeding chickens
“It was a mess,” Heinlein recalled last week while sitting in his third-floor office of the historic brick building in Newtown.
Heinlein – and president Joe Motz – went to the tiny Arab country of Qatar because the Motz Group, which installed fields for the Sydney Olympics in 2000, had a world-class reputation for creating lush playing fields in the most hostile of environments.
But beyond that international reputation, something else was at stake, a bigger carrot than a weeklong overseas job.
Qatar was looking to contract with a company to develop soccer fields at 12 other stadiums and 12 practice soccer fields. The work had to be done in time for the 2006 Asian Games, an event that would bring athletes from 43 nations to Qatar and mean an investment in $15 billion in housing and stadiums.
The construction of new fields could be worth more than $4 million in revenues to Motz. But first there was this little problem of a beige field at Al Saad.
From the ground up
It had been a nearly 30-year road to Qatar for The Motz Group.
Joe Motz founded the company as a one-man landscape maintenance operation in Cincinnati after he graduated from Ohio State University in 1977 with a degree in agronomy. His first equipment was a used pickup truck, a shovel and a will to work.
As the residential lawn care business took off in the early 1980’s, Motz spun off the maintenance division but also increasingly sought work to maintain sports fields for high schools and the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University.
When the brown family asked how to improve the Cincinnati Bengal’s practice fields at Spinney Field in Queensgate, the company began to focus on sports field management and construction. That in turn led Motz to buy the rights to what’s know as Prescription Athletic Turf and the development of proprietary natural and artificial turf.
“Our first huge break – and it was huge – was reconstruction of the field in Miami at Pro Player Stadium back in 1995,” said Heinlein. “We tore out that field and replaced it in 46 days. We started that after Super Bowl XXIX before baseball season. We were two cocky kids saying, ‘Man, we can do this.’ We didn’t have a clue.
“We’d never take that job today.” Since that job, the company has replaced more that 30 professional or collegiate fields. It has 12 employees, and Motz won’t disclose revenues.
And it’s busy. Besides sodding three fields in 20 days for the Sydney games, the company also has installed natural turf with synthetic stabilization or synthetic turf for Super Bowls XXXIII and XXXV in Miami and Tampa, the Great American Ball Park, Ohio Stadium and Ohio State University and Atlanta Braves’ Turner Field.
The company resume doesn’t end there: Dodger Stadium, Camden Yards and plenty of artificial turf fields for local high schools including Anderson, St. Xavier, and Covington Catholic.
Tops in the field
The company is known for its high-tech approach to growing grass on fields that receive some of the toughest treatment known to grass.
“We installed it because we were convinced that the latest generation of artificial surface eliminated knee, ankle and shoulder problems that athletes used to experience,” said Paul Zook, director of communications and events for St. Xavier. The Tom Ballaban Field at St. Xavier Stadium had its first game on September 2003 and today it serves three football teams, three soccer teams and two lacrosse teams.
“In years past, we couldn’t maintain that field with varsity playing on it every Friday, let alone all those teams,” Zook said.
Motz, which has patent and trademark rights to its woven yarn and plastic approach to growing grass for athletic fields, found none of that mattered much in “Before my arrival, Mark went on a hunt for grass somewhere in the kingdom to replace the dead grass,” Motz said. “He found some on the ground of the palace.”
So the Motz crew pulled the grass off the palace grounds nearby Doha. The approach was decidedly old-fashioned: No underground network of irrigation “We had brought along an old-fashioned sod cutter – one you walk behind,” Heinlein said. “We cut out the replacement grass in two-foot swaths.”
They did a deep cut on the replacement grass and rolled it around a four-foot length of PVC piping. A deep cut of about two inches would be a heavy enough carpet of grass that no player’s twists or turns would lift or reconfigure it.
Two days before the games were to begin, the prince visited the dug-up field in the 25,000-seat stadium. This was the prince’s personal stadium, a place where he personally picked out the color scheme and other architectural elements. The prince was shocked because in his eyes what was bad was now much, much “We told him to wait for us to get the new grass down,” Motz said. “We told him everything would be fine.”
And it was.
Now The Motz Group has a tentative agreement to oversee redevelopment of 12 fields in Qatar stadiums. Executives hope it is the beginning of something even bigger with spin-off work possible in South Africa or elsewhere in the Middle East.
About Qatar
How it is pronounced: Closest approximation to the native pronunciation falls between cutter and gutter, but not guitar.
Location: Peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf.
Population: 840,290; roughly half the capital of Doha.
Climate: Mild, pleasant winter; very hot summers, with temperatures ranging from 75 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Less than 2 percent of the land is arable, with the rest a flat, barren desert. Annual rainfall averages 3.2 inches.
Language: Arabic; English is widely spoken.
Religion: 95 percent Muslim.
Gross domestic product in 2004: about 32.2 billion.
Major exports: Oil, liquefied natural gas. Qatar, an OPEC member, has huge gas reserves. Its exports give the country one of the world’s highest per capita incomes, about $30,000 (U.S.)
Politics: Qatar is a monarchy, with power held since the 1800’s by amirs of the al-Thani family. There are no political parties but there have been liberal reforms, including women the right to vote.
*Sources: U.S. State Department; Central Intelligence Agency
Making ‘sweet water’
A soccer field of Bermuda grass in Florida is not really very much like a soccer field of Bermuda grass of Qatar, according to Joe Motz, president of The Motz Group.
For one thing, Florida has groundwater and a water table.
Qatar relies on expensive desalinization plants that turn seawater into what’s called “sweet water” for its irrigation and drinking water.
“It is very precious commodity in Qatar,” Motz said. “People who work on the golf course actually bottle water and take it home from work at night.”
Revenues from the vast natural gas reserves in Qatar are paying for the real estate development that is in turn bring sweeping changes to Qatar, particularly in the capital of Doha.
“You’ll see a little village like Newtown on one trip over, and when you come back, it’s gone, all gone,” Motz said.
Once Motz asked where everyone had moved. His guide gestured to a nearby collection of new buildings.
“They said, ‘Oh, they’re living over in that complex over there.’ And you look and see these buildings that just came out of nowhere,” Motz said.
Beneath the grass
While The Motz Group offers four varieties of athletic field turf, its TS-II Synthetically Stabilized Turf has become a popular choice for colleges or professional teams that want the resilience of artificial turf but the look of natural grass.
Above a complex and often computer-based array of 12-inch flat drain panels, there fields can include.
On top of the dirt, a heat infused watertight barrier.
A 12-inch layer of select sand for a root zone.
Water gauges that transmit root zone moisture conditions to a computer server
If it’s a TS-II field, the turf surface will be manufactured from jute from Calcutta, India, and yarn from Holland that is tufted at a plant in Dalton, Ga.
For more information contact:
Mark A. Heinlein, Senior Vice President
The Motz GroupSM
Phone: 513.533.6452
Fax: 513.871.5889
email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
