How to Design & Build a School Athletic Field

Last Updated on April 1, 2025 by UDC Sports

Designing and building a school athletic field isn’t just putting down turf and painting straight lines on it. It’s a process—start to finish—that combines engineering, site prep, drainage planning, safety standards, and athletic performance considerations. And whether you’re working for a school district, a private school, a church, or a rec department, or the pressure’s on to get it right.

Kids, coaches, and the community are all counting on a field that’s safe, durable, and built to perform So let’s walk through what actually goes into a well-built athletic field—and how to avoid costly mistakes from the jump.

Start With the End in Mind: What’s the Field For?

Before anyone fires up an excavator or lays out cones, you’ve got to get crystal clear on the field’s purpose.

The very first thing that needs to be done is to figure out what this field is actually for. You’d be surprised how many issues (and costs) down the road can come from not getting clear on this early.

It’s not just a building a “soccer field” or “football field”—those labels only scratch the surface. What we’re really asking is: how is this field expected to perform, and who’s going to be using it?

Start by identifying the primary use cases. Is it:

• A single-sport field like a dedicated baseball diamond with bullpens, dugouts, and a backstop?
• A multi-sport field/stadium that’ll host football in the fall, soccer in the spring, and maybe some lacrosse or flag football in between?
• A track and field facility that needs a regulation track oval, jump pits, and throwing areas?
• Or a general-use PE and rec field that’ll mostly see non-competitive use?

Each of those comes with its own layout rules, safety zones, material choices, and long-term considerations about durability/wear. As a quick example, football fields need reinforced high-wear zones between the hash marks, while soccer fields have different turf fiber length preferences and line marking standards. Building a baseball outfield comes with different slope and drainage needs than a football gridiron, and so on.

You’ll also want to look at:

• Seasonal use – Will this field need to handle year-round play, or is it used mostly during a single sports season?
• Volume of use – Is it for varsity athletics with occasional weekend games, or are hundreds of students using it every day for PE and practice?
• Shared vs. dedicated space – Will multiple programs share this space, or is it being purpose-built for one team or department?
• Campus planning – Is this part of a broader facilities upgrade, or is it a one-off project? That impacts future access, expansion, and utilities planning.

These can sound like abstract planning questions at first, but the answers can directly shape your field’s design footprint, what surfacing options are realistic, how you’ll handle drainage and runoff, and even what kind of sports equipment and fencing you’ll need. The earlier these things are locked in, the fewer surprises come later when it’s time to break ground.

Site Evaluation

This is where the boots hit the dirt, literally.

Before any design gets formalized—before the turf type is picked or the layout gets approved—you’ve got to know exactly what kind of site you’re building on.  What looks like a “flat field” for building to most people can turn out to be hiding poor drainage, problematic soil, or buried infrastructure. If you skip this step or rush through it, you’re gambling with the whole project timeline.

A thorough site evaluation typically covers:

Topography & Grading Needs

Start by taking a good look at the slope and elevation. Even a few inches of rise or dip across the field can make a big difference. You’re basically figuring out if the site is naturally flat, sloped, or shaped like a bowl—and how that’s going to affect how water moves when it rains.

Many high-performance fields are designed with a slight crown or grade to help water drain correctly. It doesn’t have to be dramatic—just enough to keep water from pooling. The goal is to work with the land, not fight against it.

Soil Conditions

The type of soil under your field plays a massive role in how you build your subbase and drainage.

Sandy soil drains quickly, which can be useful, but doesn’t offer much stability for compaction.

Clay holds its shape well but retains water and drains slowly, which can lead to soggy conditions if not addressed properly.

Loam sits somewhere in the middle and is usually more balanced, but even then, there are variations.

Because soil behavior directly affects everything from grading strategy to underdrain layout, it’s a smart move to get a geotechnical report done early in the planning phase. That soil data gives your team the information they need to engineer a field that holds up over time and performs the way it’s supposed to.

Drainage Implications

Once we know the slope and the soil, we can determine how water will move—or not move—across and through the site. Depending on the findings, you might need underdrains, French drains, or even retention areas around the field perimeter.

If you’re building an artificial turf field, the drainage plan needs to be especially precise. Unlike natural grass, which can absorb some water on its own, synthetic grass relies entirely on the drainage system underneath to handle rainfall. That means water has to drain straight down through the turf and infill—then move across the base layers to reach the drain pipes.

To make that happen, the base is built in carefully compacted layers of stone, each with a specific purpose. And those layers have to be graded with laser-level accuracy to make sure water flows exactly where it’s supposed to.

There’s not much room for error—if the slope is off, even slightly, you can end up with standing water or uneven surfaces.

Underground Utilities

Always do a utility locate early. We’ve seen irrigation lines where no one thought there’d be any, old concrete slabs buried just below the surface, and even power lines running diagonally across a field footprint. It’s not just avoiding accidents, it’s avoiding reroutes, delays, and unexpected costs.

Site Access

A great field on a hard-to-access site is a logistical headache. You want to assess whether construction equipment can safely and legally get in and out. That includes delivery trucks, pavers, rollers, and turf installers.

If the site has limited entry points or is squeezed between other structures, it may require staging areas, fencing reroutes, or tighter scheduling to keep things moving smoothly.

Design & Layout (Lines, Goals, and Beyond)

Once the site is evaluated and the project’s scope is locked in, this is when we start translating needs into actual plans. The design phase is where everything on paper starts to take real shape. And this stage is critical. Get this right, and the rest of the project tends to fall into place. Get it wrong, and you’re in for headaches down the road.

Field Orientation Matters

One of the first decisions we make is how the field will be oriented. That might sound minor, but sunlight angle alone can be a huge factor—especially for sports like baseball and football. You don’t want a quarterback staring into the sun on every pass, or a center fielder losing track of fly balls in the glare. North-south orientation is ideal when it fits, but not every site allows that, so sometimes it’s about minimizing the compromises.

What Surrounds the Field

Design isn’t just what happens inside the lines. You have to plan for everything around the field, too:

• Spectator areas – Are you adding bleachers? Is there enough space to safely accommodate them with proper egress?
• Fencing and netting – Will you need backstop protection, ball containment, or access gates for maintenance vehicles?
• Lighting – If the field will be used in the evening, you’ll want to plan pole locations early. We also consider light spill and glare control, especially near neighborhoods.
• Parking and access – Don’t forget where everyone’s supposed to park and how they’ll get from the lot to the field, especially during big events.

Safety Zones & Buffer Space

Every sport has minimum safety zones around the field of play. These aren’t just optional extras—they’re part of NFHS and NCAA guidelines, and they affect the total footprint of your project. For example, a football field with proper runoff zones on all sides might be a lot wider than expected, especially once you factor in benches, coaches’ boxes, and fencing. Overcrowding the sidelines is asking for injuries.

ADA Compliance

You also need to make sure the field and its amenities are accessible. That includes paths of travel, spectator seating, restrooms, and any ramps or transitions from hardscape to turf.

ADA shouldn’t just be about checking boxes on a form—it should be about making sure the field can truly be used by all the students at the school and/or all the kids in the community.

Drainage Planning Built Into Design

Even though drainage is its own focus area (which we’ll cover in the next section), it should be baked into the design from the beginning. Slopes, catch basins, underdrain routes, and water management structures have to be integrated into the field layout—not tacked on after the fact. With a full-service design/build team like UDC Sports, that coordination happens up front between the design and construction crews, so everyone’s working from the same plan.

Multi-Sport Line Markings

For shared-use fields, one of the more practical design decisions is how to mark multiple sports on the same surface. Most schools choose contrasting colors (white for football, yellow or blue for soccer, etc.), but you have to be smart about placement. You don’t want soccer corners landing in end zones, or lacrosse arcs interfering with football hash marks. Layout has to serve all programs, and sometimes that means prioritizing one over another depending on how heavily each is used.

For multi-use fields, you can often overlap field markings with different colors—just be sure coaches and refs are on the same page.

This is also when you decide between natural grass vs. synthetic turf—more on that below.

Drainage Is Everything

If there’s one thing that can ruin an otherwise great athletic field, it’s poor drainage. It doesn’t matter how nice the turf is, how well the layout was planned, or how much you spent—if water can’t get off or out of the field properly, the whole thing turns into a muddy liability.

This is one of those areas where experience matters, because drainage is highly dependent on your soil type, usage expectations, field surface, and even your local climate. A field in the Florida panhandle has different needs from one in the Texas panhandle.

Here’s how sports field contractors and construction companies typically approach drainage depending on the field type:

For Natural Grass Fields

With grass, the goal is to get water moving away from the surface as efficiently as possible without damaging the turf or overloading the soil.

• Crown grading is the old-school go-to—where the field has a gentle slope from the center to the sidelines. It’s subtle, often less than 1%, but it keeps water from pooling between the hash marks or in the middle of a soccer pitch.
• French drains or collector drains can be added beneath the surface if the soil holds water or if the site sees frequent rain.
• Perimeter swales or trenches may be required to guide water away from the field and into proper drainage channels.

The key is designing this into the grading and subbase from the beginning—not after the turf’s already down and the field starts showing problems.

For Synthetic Grass Fields

Compared to grass, Artificial turf fields are even more sensitive to drainage planning. Because you’re layering multiple materials—turf, infill, shock pad, geotextile, and compacted stone—you need a drainage system that moves water both vertically and horizontally.

• Underdrain systems (perforated pipe surrounded by drainage stone) are installed beneath the turf base layer to collect water that passes through the surface.
• The aggregate base needs to be precisely compacted and graded to guide water toward those pipes without creating low spots.
• We also build in side outlets or daylight drains that tie into municipal stormwater systems or approved retention areas.

The turf itself is permeable, but if the drainage underneath isn’t engineered correctly, water has nowhere to go—and you’re back to puddles and shutdowns.

Stormwater Management Considerations

In most cases, especially for schools and public facilities, there are local stormwater codes to consider. That could mean:

• Designing for maximum allowable runoff rates
  
• Building retention ponds or bioswales near the field
• Using detention tanks underground if there’s no space for open drainage

These systems help prevent flooding in surrounding areas and reduce long-term field damage.

Drainage can often be planned in parallel with grading and surfacing selection, because they all work together.

At UDC, we design drainage in from day one. We don’t treat it like an add-on.

If you’re ever unsure whether a field’s been properly drained, an expert can usually tell within a few minutes of walking on it. And if you’ve already got an existing field with drainage issues, it’s usually not a lost cause—but fixing it is a lot more expensive than getting it right up front.

Choosing the Right Surface: Grass vs. Turf

Here’s the quick rundown:

Natural Grass Pros:

• Lower initial cost
• Preferred by baseball, some track and football programs
• Softer underfoot

Natural Grass Cons:

• Higher maintenance (mowing, watering, fertilizing, aerating)
• Vulnerable to weather
• Can’t handle constant use

Synthetic Turf Pros:

• All-weather playability
• Lower long-term maintenance
• Can take heavy, multi-sport use

Synthetic Turf Cons:

• Higher upfront cost
• Requires shock pad and proper infill design
• Surface heat can be an issue in warm climates

If your field is expected to handle high foot traffic—especially in schools with limited space or multi-use scheduling—synthetic turf is often the smarter long-term play.

Construction Phase

Once design’s approved, permits are in place, and materials are ordered, it’s go time. From groundwork to goalposts, the build process for a school sports field often looks something like this:

1. Site Prep & Grading – Earthwork, drainage installation, and forming the subbase.
2. Base Construction – Rock base, laser grading, and compaction.
3. Surface Installation – Whether it’s sod, seeded grass, or synthetic turf with infill and seams.
4. Equipment & Amenities – Goal posts, netting, fencing, bleachers, scoreboards, and lighting.
5. Final QA – Surface testing, drainage verification, safety checks.

Tip: Don’t Forget Maintenance & Long-Term Planning

Even the best-built field needs upkeep. Synthetic fields should be brushed and cleaned regularly, and infill levels maintained. Grass fields need standard lawn care, plus special attention after heavy use.

You should also:

• Schedule annual GMAX (impact absorption) testing on turf
• Keep records of use and maintenance
• Have a replacement plan for high-wear items (like netting, turf logos, or painted lines)
• Consider sports field removal and recycling services when it’s time to upgrade or replace. Planning ahead helps keep costs predictable.

Final Thoughts

 

Designing and building a school athletic field is a serious investment—not just in materials and labor, but in the athletes and communities who’ll use it for years to come. Whether you’re designing and building a baseball complex, a multi-use turf field, or a full sports facility upgrade, the most successful projects always start with the right plan, the right partner, and the right process.

If you need help figuring out where to start—or if you’re in the middle of a field that’s already got issues—feel free to reach out to us. At UDC, sports construction is what we do, and we’re always happy to help. Call us at 828-518-5787 or click here to email us.