Cooper-Killian upgrades near completion, drawing tourney play

Miles Park: Precise work – including monster sewing machines on wheels – required time.

Jenny Fillmer Edwards: Springfield is big enough to provide excellent fields for its athletes.

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The $28.5 million renovation to the Springfield-Greene County Park Board’s Cooper and Killian sports complexes is nearing completion.

The two-phase project kicked off in November 2022 and is anticipated to be finished in November – too late to be fully operational in year one of a three-year pact between the Greater Springfield Sports Commission Inc. and Special Olympics Missouri.

It’s an event that is anticipated to bring 650 athletes and coaches to the Queen City for competition while generating over $1 million in economic impact, officials say.

Lance Kettering, executive director of the Sports Commission, said Special Olympics is the first event booked at the Cooper and Killian complexes since most of the new improvements have been in place. Because work on the softball field surfaces is scheduled to be ongoing at the Killian Complex into November, the softball competition at this year’s event will have to be held off-site at Meador Park but will return to the central Cooper-Killian location in years two and three.

In a June presentation to Springfield City Council, Kettering said the Special Olympics outdoor games, set for Oct. 17-19, will include softball but also bocce ball and flag football at the Lake Country Soccer Complex, tennis at Cooper Tennis and golf at the Bill and Payne Stewart Golf Course.

“The upcoming improvements at the Cooper and Killian Complex will only strengthen us going forward and position Springfield as a premier destination for sports tourism,” he said. “We’re really looking forward to those improvements being complete.”

Kettering said the Special Olympics games help to show the versatility of the site for attracting athletic events.

“It’s going to be a really good proof of concept if there are events that do multiple disciplines,” he said.

Asked if he could quantify the expected return on investment, Kettering said that data doesn’t exist, and he added that the impact would be hard to measure. Before the turf installation, the facilities were largely overlooked for tournament business.

“Tournament companies weren’t even looking at Springfield as it currently stood with only one turf field,” he said. “They will now.”

He said the facility wasn’t on the radar of the Missouri Youth Soccer Association, which requires turf for its boys’ and girls’ State Cup and Presidents Cup tourneys.

He noted Lake Country Soccer has two annual tournaments, and their spring tournament showed growth following the installation of turf fields. The 2025 tourney drew 118 registered teams, while the previous year, on grass fields, drew under 100.

The project
The project is funded through $20.8 million in American Rescue Plan Act allocations through the Missouri General Assembly, with $13.5 million, and the city of Springfield, with $8.2 million, according to Springfield-Greene County Park Board officials.

Additional funds were provided by the city of Springfield at $5.2 million; Springfield-Greene County Park Board at $1 million; and Visit Springfield, Missouri, at $631,000.

Phase I of the project, completed in March, focused mainly on soccer facilities and included the installation of synthetic turf on eight Cooper Park/Lake Country Soccer fields and the development of a new soccer stadium environment.

Phase 2, aimed at improvements in baseball and softball facilities, is projected to finish in November with the installation of synthetic turf on six fields at Killian Softball Complex and five fields at Cooper Youth Baseball Complex, allowing for conversion between baseball and softball games on a total of 11 turf fields.

Miles Park, the park district’s assistant director over operations, said a specific November date for completion has not been set, but he said Missouri State University softball will return to practicing at the Killian facility at that time. The Killian stadium field is MSU’s home field, he said, and the team practices there all through the winter.

Synthetic turf makes winter practice possible, said Jenny Fillmer Edwards, public information administrator for the park board.

“That’s the beauty of synthetic turf,” she said. “It extends the season so you’re not waiting for grass to grow.”

Park said the facility has hosted several Missouri State High School Activities Association tournaments, and he expects that both to continue and to grow.

“It does make us more competitive,” he said. “When we have the turf fields, it places us in a more competitive position to go for other events that we’ve not hosted in the past – larger events that can host more teams.”

Field prep is minimal with turf, he said, and there’s no worry about having a wet field or readying a muddy infield for play.

“The advantage to the turf is that you can play on it immediately following a rain or, in fact, in the rain, as long as lightning isn’t happening,” he said. “That places us in a better position to compete against other municipalities who have such facilities. We’ll have them soon.”

The desire to bring more tournament business to Springfield was a key reason the project was undertaken, Park said.

“We have lots to offer, but we were really lagging behind some of the other municipalities from a sports perspective because we weren’t able to offer up the turf fields. It makes a big difference.”

Another upgrade that will reduce maintenance requirements at the athletic facilities is the addition of all-new LED lighting. It’s more energy efficient and lasts longer, Park noted.

Local benefit
Edwards said drawing tournaments to Springfield is an obvious benefit to the upgrades, but there is another.

“The other side to this coin is that we have local athletes that practice on these fields as their home fields,” she said. “They were experiencing going to Tulsa or Kansas City or another community and playing on nice turf fields.”

Springfield is a big enough city with large enough sports programs that its athletes should also have top-notch fields, according to Edwards.

“We think our local athletes deserve to be on the state-of-the-art surfaces and playing fields – not just when they’re the visiting team,” she said.

Other advantages Park noted are a level of consistency from field to field and on all areas of the field, measured through annual testing of impact attenuation to make sure the field is in its original design condition. This also contributes to the safety of the surfaces, he said.

He added that the fields look fantastic, and that’s the product of a very detailed approach to building them. They start with base that has to be graded very precisely with compaction testing – the goal is a 95% compaction rate – before the gravel profile is put into place.

“It’s pretty exacting work – not something you can just go out and quickly do,” he said.

There is stormwater piping in a herringbone pattern under each surface, draining to a larger piping around the perimeter and ultimately to retention basins constructed as part of the project, Park said.

“There’s a lot of site work,” he said.

The turf itself comes in large rolls, 12 feet in width, that are rolled into place before the seams are sewn.

“Visualize a monster sewing machine that is on wheels that is pneumatically powered with a large air compressor,” he said. “Essentially, those 12-foot-wide rolls of material are all sewn together on the field.”

That all starts to answer the question of why the project seemed to take a long time, Park said, noting the process is not like rolling out sod in a lawn.

He added that the soccer project installed 16 3/4 acres of synthetic turf, while the Cooper and Killian baseball and softball project will lay 20 1/4 acres of turf.

“That’s a lot of sitework to get right,” he said.

GeoSurfaces Inc., which is based in Louisiana but has a Bloomsdale office, performed the work for the city.