The hexagonal modules were one of the team’s greatest innovations. The roots of the grass could be kept intact when the sections of turf were moved into the dome. It would be the first time a natural grass field was installed on top of an artificial pitch in a domed stadium.
When Rogers watched a team enter the dome for their first practice, they didn’t inspect the pitch. Apparently, it felt normal to them. Like little boys, they tried to punt footballs high enough to reach the roof of the gargantuan dome. Rogers considered the project a success. It would earn him a nickname: the “guru of grass”.
But at the end of the 1994 World Cup, Sorochan climbed to the top of the dome and looked down at the pitch.
“You could see the wear on the field,” Sorochan says. “I thought, wow, how do we make that better?” Sorochan spent the rest of his time as a graduate student researching how best to grow grass indoors.
And when Fifa contacted Sorochan in 2018 for help with the 2026 World Cup, he asked Rogers and MSU to join him. What they’d have to pull off made their work at the Silverdome in 1994 seem like a child’s science fair project.
Sea kelp and silica
Typically, sod is grown as locally as possible in soil similar to where it will be installed. The act of cutting and moving the turf can stress the plants and they often need several weeks to recover.
At the World Cup, however, many of the pitches will be installed just 10 days before their first match.
Joe Wilkins III’s sprawling sod farm outside Denver, Colorado, US, is responsible for the World Cup pitches in Dallas, Atlanta, and Houston. These three stadiums will host more than a quarter of the tournament between them. The stadiums are all domes, where no direct sunlight reaches the pitch.
“They’re the biggest challenges,” Wilkins says, whose grandfather founded the Green Valley Turf Company in 1962.
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