The Wolf Den

Extreme Makeover

The Old Wolf Den

Wolf Den Stadium has just completed a 5 million dollar face lift. The once tore up, worn down turf has been replaced with the state of the art field turf. Players were constantly getting injured and other teams were starting to refuse to play here.

Coach Gazzillo heard other field were getting made over by an organization called Take the field and decided to give them a call.

TAKE THE FIELD is a public-private partnership that was rebuilding the athletic facilities of New York City public schools. TAKE THE FIELD believes its program will contribute to significant improvements in health and academic performance and lower rates of teen delinquency, drug use, and pregnancy among New York City's public school students.

In January 1999, The New York Times carried a series of three articles, collectively titled "Dropping the Ball," which reported on the poor state of sports and physical education in New York City's public school system. The series detailed a quarter century of budget slashing, resulting in the acute deterioration of physical education, sports programs, and athletic facilities across the five boroughs.

Preston Robert Tisch, Tony Kiser and Richard Kahan concluded that it would take a private sector led effort to restore these public school athletic facilities and created TAKE THE FIELD.

Over that past 40 months, TAKE THE FIELD has rebuilt 44 athletic fields. Grand Street Campus being one of them.

For more information about TAKE THE FIELD, visit http://www.takethefield.org/index.html

What makes playing on the field so great is the new FieldTruf. FieldTurf is dramatically different from traditional synthetic turf. The most striking difference is immediately obvious. Instead of a dense, abrasive rug, FieldTurf’s fiber surface is soft, silky - like new blades of grass in a spring meadow. Players can slide, tackle and tumble on FieldTurf’s unique blend of specially treated Polyethylene fibers without fear of abrasions. Rug burns are a thing of the past. The old hatred of “turf” - voiced so loudly by players, trainers, coaches, the media, even parents and doctors - simply vanishes, a distant memory from the rough “carpet age.”

But FieldTurf is much more than just the absence of abrasions. Unlike traditional turf, FieldTurf does not rely on an underlying shock pad for safety, resilience and player comfort. Rather, like its natural grass cousin, FieldTurf’s grass fibers are surrounded and stabilized by a special blend of “synthetic earth” - FieldTurf’s patented mixture of smooth, rounded silica sand, rubber granules, and NIKE GRIND made of re-ground athletic shoe material.

The rubber granules are a key component. Tire rubber is cryogenically frozen, shattered into smooth, clean, rounded particles, sized and shaped to stay “in suspension” with the sand, which is of a similar size, shape and weight. The sand and rubber are precision layered to guarantee uniformity, with an installation process that is also patented.

The result: A stable, resilient, uniform, shock-absorbing surface. FieldTurf is the original and only system emulating natural grass, ideal not only for athletes at the elite level but for everyday activities of active, competitive young people.

Before	After

The Wolf Den now has a new state of the art Football/Soccer Field, Baseball Field, Softball Field, 8-Lane Track, Field Events, Tennis Courts, Handball Courts, Bleachers, and Scoreboard.

The Wolf Den is one of the premier athletic complexes in the city.

For directions to the Wolf Den please click here: Directions