From Sporting KC to KU football in 48 hours: How Children’s Mercy Park will transform

The last time Children’s Mercy Park hosted a football game — American football, that is — was in the 2017 NCAA Division II football championship.

Now, after seven years, football will once again be played at Children’s Mercy Park. KU football will host its home opener against Lindenwood in the soccer venue on Aug. 29.

The park, typically the home of Sporting Kansas City (MLS), will have fewer than 48 hours to transform its soccer pitch on Aug. 27 to a football field on Aug. 29.

On that Tuesday, the site will host the U.S. Open Cup soccer semifinal: Sporting KC vs. Indy Eleven (7 p.m. Central). That would leave some 40 hours to get it changed over before pregame warmups for KU and Lindenwood, set to kick off 7 p.m. the following Thursday.

Josh Blackford, the stadium general manager, spoke about all aspects of the field changeover in a conversation with The Star. The process indeed involves a lot of change — and an even quicker timeline.

“There’s what we call our field integrity or our pitch integrity piece of this: Essentially, how well and how is the grass itself responding to the activity that’s happening on it?” Blackford said. “You’ve got soccer, a little more finesse. …Football is a lot more cutting and more physical between the defensive line and offensive line — just a lot of different activity we haven’t seen.

“Then there’s obviously the field-marking piece. We go from soccer lines and soccer pitch to football lines and football field as well as goalposts and nets.”

Blackford said the transition between the two surfaces typically takes little time.

Still, the grounds crew will deploy many strategies to handle the increase in activity and minimize the ghosting of the football lines — making sure they remain prominent and visible through the game — when it’s time to transform the field.

“For KU football, our goal is to make it look awesome and pristine,” Blackford said. “We will flip that back over as a pristine soccer pitch within just a few days. It takes us about six hours in total to paint the football field, including all the logos, patches, numbers.”

After the U.S. Open Cup match, the plan is to start working on the field immediately. The goals is for the field to be ready within 24 hours, so Kansas football can have a walkthrough on it one day later.

Blackford pointed out that Kansas practicing at the stadium earlier in August helped give the crew a better sense of what needs to happen for the actual game.

Although the surfaces are ultimately different for a soccer match vs. a football game, there isn’t a complete overhaul of the grass. Rather, fertilizer will play a key role in ensuring the field is ready for Kansas’ home opener.

“We deploy some strategies: We have fertilizer. We have some grow lights,” he said. “What we like to do is grow the grass to a greater length than what we typically play for soccer. It’ll be a longer cut on the mowers. The reason for this is it helps with the resiliency of the plant and the grass for football. But at the same time, from a paint and a marking standpoint, the longer grass, when you paint it and you come back and mow it, you’re hopefully removing lines as you cut the grass away.

“We will use grow lights to help stimulate the growth. We will pray for some rain, some good weather and also some rain. We obviously irrigate the field a couple of times every day.”

Blackford downplayed any concerns about field dimensions, pointing out that a full-sized soccer pitch is 120 yards, which is typical for a football field.

“When you put in the goalposts, you can kind of see a football field come together to take shape,” he said. “You narrow in the sidelines for college football. … The unique thing with Children’s Mercy Park, we have the soccer pitch, so when we convert to football we have very deep benches behind the teams just because of the width of the soccer pitch there.”

Blackford told The Star that KU desires to present the field as something very familiar to fans coming for a football game. There will be markings in the end zones, league logos throughout the field, and more.

“It’s going to be very intimate. Imagine 21,000 people in Children’s Mercy Park, standing room only, and you’ve got this just very compact, very, very cool, intimate venue,” he said. “I think it’s going to just be an awesome experience for the University of Kansas community and everybody else that’s going to come out for the games.”