Bricktown Park
Oklahoma City, Oaklahoma

A community with a “focus on the future” would be an accurate way to describe Oklahoma City. Residents can now enjoy the new Bricktown Ballpark, a $24-million project spearheading a wide-ranging community effort to revitalize Oklahoma City’s downtown warehouse area known as “Bricktown.” Chosen as the supplier of irrigation products for stadium installation, Rain Bird is putting in place its standard workhorse, the RC-1860AB Controller (the “Mercedes Benz” of irrigation systems), as part of a special construction design plan.

Design Variables

Bricktown Ballpark is a major-league design field incorporating a sand-based athletic field reflecting the trend toward using natural grass in stadiums. Its dimensions are essentially those of a 2-acre golf green. In fact, the Ballpark employs the same design and development techniques as a golf course green, using a combination of sand and sand/peat for the root-zone mixture with Bermuda hybrid Tifway 419 turf.

Steve Schuler, sales manager for the Rain Bird distributor Irrigation Station in Oklahoma City, explains that this type of golf-green installation consists of a drainage grid laid out on top of the subgrade which is then filled with 4-inch pea gravel. “Next,” Steve says, “ ‘V’ [herringbone design] trenches are laid out in the gravel to contain the irrigation system, with the benefit of eliminating the need to dig ditches.” With this particular design, the Bricktown Ballpark field will have a 15- to 21-inch per-hour drain rate (known as the percolation rate).

Bricktown Particulars

Marty Grooms of Grooms Irrigation, local contractor for the Bricktown site, says “we were happy to install Rain Bird products from the ground up.” His company designed the irrigation layout for other MAPS projects in Oklahoma as well. “It was great that, because the ballpark went with Rain Bird, there weren’t the usual installation delays,” Marty reports. “In fact, my crew loved working with the Falcon sprinkler heads. Because of its long radius and wide selection of nozzles, Falcon stainless steel rotors were the ideal rotor for all areas of the playing surface both full- and part-circle.”

The task of building the athletic field playing surface went to Anglea Turf Construction of Italy, Texas, not far from Dallas. Anglea has experience in field construction for schools, colleges, and professional sports teams. Its staff put in the skinned surface area for the MLB Florida Marlins, the sand base playing surface for The Ballpark in Arlington, New Orleans Zephers (Houston Astros Triple A Affiliate), and the New Orleans Saints Training Facility. Jim Garrett of Anglea oversaw much of the Bricktown installation. He’s a trained agronomist with an extensive background in natural turf construction. “The scope of our job,” he says, “was to install the entire playing surface, starting from the subgrade to the turf surface, including the drainage and irrigation systems.”

The drainage system of an athletic playing field depends, like that of a golf course, on elevation. The “V” trenches were tailor-made for installation of Rain Bird products, given the limitation of no more than 2 feet of fall for the subgrade. Bricktown features black PVC flat perforated ADS pipe, 12 inches wide and an inch-and-a-half thick, microslitted for proper drainage, totalling about 12,000 linear feet. Because the ballpark is so close to a river, the subgrade could not be sloped — meaning that installation was somewhat out of the ordinary. Given these limitations, Rain Bird Falcon and R-50 rotors are installed on 90% of the field in a “block system” irrigation pattern.

Competitive Edge

Plans call for Rain Bird products to be used in the irrigation design of other MAPS projects, including a riverwalk. One of the key reasons that Oklahoma City officials are happy to be working with Rain Bird products is ease of usability of the RC-1860AB Controller product. Rain Bird irrigation systems — comprising the most maintenance-free equipment on the market — offer a competitive edge when it comes to stadiums like that at Bricktown.

The reason, according to Steve Schuler, is that “the contractor usually maintains the system only for a certain period of time. Then, the county or city public works personnel or a similar authorized group takes it over. These people, while proficient, typically have varying degrees of irrigation knowledge. Using Rain Bird products is very appealing to them quite simply because our controller is easy to program, operate, and maintain.”

Doug Stafford of the Oklahoma City visitors and convention bureau sums it up when he says: “We are a city that is most definitely looking to the future. Our redevelopment effort has rekindled a lot of interest in Bricktown on the part of retailers, which will be good for the local economy. A number of new businesses have opened in the area in the past year, including restaurants, retail shops, and an antiques store.”

Rain Bird is proud to be an integral part of such an ambitious urban revitalization effort, one which will have far-reaching positive effects on a community over a million residents strong — and growing.