Professional baseball is back in Columbus, GA at Golden Park, now renamed Synovus Park. The Atlanta Braves’ Double-A affiliate, now the Columbus Clingstones, opened its first season in town earlier this spring with a sold-out crowd on opening night. The stadium dates back to 1926, but the field and infrastructure have been extensively renovated. NorthBridge® Bermudagrass, grown at Green Acres Turf Farm and installed by Precision Turf, gave this historic ballpark a surface built for modern play.
Gary Youmans, owner of Green Acres Turf Farm in Furman, SC, supplied the NorthBridge Bermudagrass for the field. He started growing the variety in 2023, and demand took off quickly. Youmans said the project went far beyond installing new turfgrass, describing it as a full stadium renovation that still preserved elements of historic Golden Park.
NorthBridge Bermudagrass at Synovus Park in Columbus, GA.
Built for Performance
With a stadium renovation underway, turfgrass selection was one of the most critical decisions ahead of opening night. The Clingstones’ Director of Field Operations, Brendan Seaver, led the selection process, which he recalled as very intense and detailed.
Seaver said they were looking for a variety that could handle the demands of the site. “NorthBridge fit that mold of cold tolerance, disease resistance and more resistance to action.”
The Clingstones opted to work with Precision Turf, a trusted athletic field contractor known for large-scale sports projects and past experience with NorthBridge and Sod Solutions.
AJ Gower, project manager at Precision, first stepped into the park in late October 2024, facing a short window to complete the rebuild. His team reconstructed the field from the subgrade up, adding new drainage, soil layers and irrigation before laying sod.
Gower said NorthBridge is a strong choice for sports fields because it offers flexibility in mowing heights and management. He also noted its ability to stripe well and retain color later into the cool season.
Grown for the Game
Once NorthBridge was selected for the project, it was up to the team at Green Acres to produce a consistent, game-ready product on a tight schedule. The farm spans over 2,500 acres and produces a range of grasses including centipede, zoysia, bermudagrass, St. Augustine and paspalum. NorthBridge, Youmans noted, has quickly become a top variety across sports and golf markets, and said they’ve moved a significant number of acres this year.
He explained that Precision Turf came to the farm and managed the overseeding rate and planting to ensure the grass met expectations. Then, just days before harvest, winter weather moved in. “Mother Nature blessed us with a snowstorm in mid-late January. Everything was under four or five inches of snow the week before sod was scheduled,” he said.
Despite the delay, the sod held up and stayed on track for the field build. “It’s just a testament to the NorthBridge’s durability, cold tolerance and wear tolerance. It transitioned really, really well.” With the installation completed at the end of January and opening night set for mid-April, Youmans added, “That’s not a lot of time.”
Gower explained he wasn’t concerned about the snow impacting the quality of the sod for the project. “Snow acts as an insulator so I knew the grass underneath would be good because Gary’s a very proactive owner. He’s in the field all the time and knows his plots and what he has in the field. We weren’t really concerned at all.”
NorthBridge Bermudagrass harvested at Green Acres Turf Farm in January 2025.
Fast Track to the Finish
With eight truckloads of sod on the road, the next phase of the project shifted to Columbus, where installation crews had just weeks to finish the field. Gower and his team at Precision Turf laid the sod in three days. He said Seaver worked hand-in-hand with them throughout the installation, checking the seams and perfecting the surface ahead of Opening Night.
“He got on the field as we were rolling and started fertilizer applications and topdressing. Two to three weeks later the grass was tacked down with good roots already,” Gower said, noting he wasn’t surprised by the quick rooting ability of NorthBridge.
NorthBridge being installed in Synovus Park in late January 2025.
Seaver was eager to get started with the new playing surface as soon as it arrived. He passed the sod trucks at 6:30 a.m. on his way to work and was the first to arrive at the field. He set up his phone behind home plate and recorded the entire process.
“I was so excited to not be staring at sand anymore and to see the sod go down. Now it looks like a baseball field,” Seaver said. “It was as strong as you could ask for sod to be. There was no fraying. There was nothing. You could see all the stolens of NorthBridge in the sod. It was overseeded when it came in.”
Seaver first mowed the field about three weeks after installation, followed by a brief warm spell in the 70s. “If you picked through the rye, you could see that NorthBridge already greening up,” he said. “Like all it needed was that little bit of heat, and it was already coming into it.” By mid-April, it was choking the ryegrass out.
Now in his tenth year in the industry, Seaver said NorthBridge is the fifth grass type he’s worked with, including two cold-season and three warm-season varieties, and he remains impressed by what he’s seen so far.
NorthBridge Bermudagrass ready for play at Synovus Park.
Daily Demands of a Pro Field
The real test began next: day-to-day maintenance through spring transition and the first homestand, making sure the grass was watered, fertilized and mowed to perfection. Seaver and his assistant, Danny Enright, manage the field daily, with 10-plus team members on game days.
“It’s a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of attention to detail. It’s understanding that it is a living organism. Every day is different, and you’re always trying to stay one step ahead of it,” he said.
Ahead of the season opener, Seaver said players and staff gave feedback on stadium details like light placement or fence height, but no one had anything negative to say about the field. It was ready, and seeing players walking around barefoot before practice or doing grounding exercises stood out. Seaver said moments like that reflected not just the field crew’s work, but the quality of the grass itself.
Seaver explained that consistency is everything when managing a professional surface. His goal is to deliver a field the players can trust every day. He said they know how the ball will skip, how far it will move and what to expect off the pattern.
That kind of confidence in the surface, especially with how NorthBridge performs, is what gives the Clingstones a real home field advantage.
NorthBridge Bermudagrass at Synovus Park on opening night, April 15, 2025.
Opening Night on NorthBridge
By first pitch, the grass held its stripe, played clean and looked as sharp as it performed. The sold-out opening night crowd watched the Clingstones secure a win on a field that delivered on every detail. From farm to finish, the collaboration between Green Acres, Precision Turf, the Clingstones grounds crew, Sod Solutions and other project partners brought Synovus Park to life and proved NorthBridge was more than ready for the moment.
Follow along on @SodSolutions social channels to catch all the behind-the-scenes footage from this project, and watch the highlight video on the Clingstones' field transformation:
This article was written by Cecilia Johnson.
