No matter how fresh and firm the field at Grisham Stadium felt at the start of football season in August, by the time the playoffs arrived in November the grass had always worn away and morphed into mud or dirt.

The field takes a beating every fall as it’s trampled on by the Carrollton High School football teams, the University of West Georgia and area recreational youth squads.

Fixing the field used to be a costly and time-consuming affair for the Trojans.

Those problems are now mere memories at Carrollton, which had its new FieldTurf installed last month.

“It’s exciting to (the players). You’ve got the lines out there that are perfect so you know about your alignment and everything,” Carrollton coach Rayvan Teague said. “When we go out and do work outs in the mornings normally you would have to deal with the dew being on the grass and the balls getting wet. Well, that doesn’t happen out there.”

The new turf is a part of the ongoing $9.5 million renovations to Grisham Stadium. Part of that price tag will also help facilitate the construction of a new fine arts center for the high school.

Teague said construction, which began in December after Carrollton’s season ended in the quarterfinals of the state playoffs, is running on schedule and expected to be completed by Sept. 1. The Trojans home opener is Sept. 12 against Avondale.

“That gives us two weeks to kind of work out the bugs, if there are any,” Teague said.

Teague estimated that Carrollton is one of 10-15 high school stadiums in Georgia with an artificial turf surface. He said the crew that installed the FieldTurf at Grisham Stadium was headed to Heard County’s stadium next to do the same there.

More than 50 college football teams and 21 NFL teams play and/or practice on FieldTurf, according to the company’s Web site.

Several schools toured the facility while the FieldTurf was being installed at Grisham Stadium, including representatives from the Douglas County school system. Teague said Douglas County is leaning toward using an artificial surface for the football stadium at the new high school being built in the county.

While he said Carrollton didn’t do a statistical study, Teague noted that according to research done at Douglas County, the cost to maintain a natural grass field each year is about $30,000.

“If you look at it that way, in 10 years that’s $300,000, and that’s a minimum,” Teague said. “We were spending a lot of money every year replacing sod and turf.”

Teague said there is little maintenance needed with FieldTurf besides for using a brushing apparatus every week or two to remove leaves and other debris from the field.

Work continues to be done on the bleachers, which will have 5,500 seats on the home side. Each seat will be 24 inches wide to comply with the new Georgia High School Association requirement. Teague said the old Grisham Stadium had a seating capacity of around 3,800 on the home side under the 24-inch requirement.

Seating capacity will not be expanded for the visitors’ bleachers, but new concession stands, restrooms and a locker room will be added.

“It’ll be a visitors’ locker room on Friday nights, so they’ll no longer have to go into our gym to dress,” Teague said. “Plus, it’ll be on their side of the stadium.”

The new locker room will also be used by the Carrollton cross country team and the girls track team.

Perched atop the home-side bleachers will be the new press box. Among its amenities will be a 22-seat VIP box, a kitchenette and a mass media room for the video scoreboard operators.

Teague and the Trojans are eager to christen the new Grisham Stadium in September.

“We’re just really excited and feel blessed to have it,” Teague said.

Carrollton track and field coach Craig Musselwhite is also excited about the eight-lane track that is being redone around the playing field.

After not being able to host to a meet last spring due to the construction, Musselwhite is looking forward to doing so much more often in the upcoming years.

“Then we’ll be able to have some double events - double high jump, double pole vault,” Musselwhite said. “Just some real quality events with hopefully a lot of schools and, you know, hopefully bring in some more money to the economy of Carrollton by having meets where people spend the night and eat at our restaurants and stuff like that.”

Musselwhite thought Carrollton may also be able to host a USATF National Meet sometime in the future.

The company that is doing the stadium renovations is working hand-in-hand with the track developments and just like with the stadium, everything is currenlty on schedule with the track as well.

“They’re still waiting for the asphalt to cure, as they say, and after that they’ll start putting the track surface down,” Musselwhite said. “But it looks good and everything’s coming along like we planned.”

And that’s music to Musselwhite’s ears after basically growing up with and seeing the former track run its course over the years.

“It’ll allow us to host more stuff at home and hopefully it’ll get some more kids out to run track and I hope it’s going to promote some more interest in the program,” Musselwhite said. “It’s exciting because I’ve been on the same facility since I’ve been about 6 years old. It’s basically been the same facility with a couple layers of rubber put on, but it’s basically the same facility that I ran on in 1972, so it’s exciting to kind of see everything come full circle.”