Kehoe Field might be the reason Astroturf went out of style. Located on top of Yates Field House, Kehoe is littered with divots and dangerous soft-spots, and it needs to be repaired before a student is seriously injured.
The field is used by hundreds of students every week. Several club sports teams and intramural sports leagues use it as their main facility, despite its inadequacies.
The varsity field hockey team even used the treacherous turf for the last few years, but after a risk assessment team surveyed the field last November, it was deemed unsafe for visiting schools to play on, and the team was forced to move all of its 2007 home games to the University of Maryland—an hour away. The field hockey team continues to use Kehoe for practice because it is the only field within a reasonable commuting distance.
“I’ve memorized where all the holes are by now because I played on it for four years,” field hockey captain Deirdre McShea (COL ’08) said.
“When we ran sprints we would just line up half the team on one side of the big divot, half the team on the other side. If you’re a student who wants to run up there and you’re paying money to be able to use it, it’s awful.”
A field that is unsafe for visiting varsity athletes is equally unsafe for Georgetown’s club and intramural athletes, and the University should not be this careless about student safety. Even students who know where the biggest danger spots are can miss smaller, unmarked crevices, causing them to roll an ankle or worse.
Kehoe’s current surface is 28 years old and poorly constructed. If Yates Field House cannot afford to replace the turf with a safer alternative from its own budget, then the University should help subsidize the cost.
For now, the most common injury on the turf is a simple scrape or turf burn, but things are bound to get worse. Repairs need to be made soon so that Yates and the University don’t get burned themselves in liability law suits.
