It all started at Boise St. with their famed “Smurf Turf,” the brainchild of Athletic Director Gene Bleymaier. He saw an opportunity to gain some attention for an otherwise nameless football program. He had the brilliant idea of installing an all-blue AstroTurf field to give the school much-needed publicity, and it worked. Now, 25-years later, Boise State has built itself into one of the best college football programs in the country with no obvious recruiting advantage other than that field. What’s more, with only 33,500 seats they even host one of college football’s post-season bowl games.
Boise remains the only school in the highest level, FBS, of college football with a non-green field, but other, smaller schools like Eastern Washington (red) and Central Arkansas (purple) have installed alternative hues in their football stadiums.
That craze has already been carried over into college basketball, where Oregon has begun playing on their chaotic-looking “Deep in the Woods” court and Towson’s court that is covered in faint tiger stripes. Cal-State Bakersfield has the most extreme court of them all, with a bright-blue playing surface of their own.
Oregon's "Deep in the Woods" court
So the obvious question is – why haven’t swim teams picked up on this? Even better, collegiate water polo teams could really grab the attention of a ton of casual sports fans with the concept.
Water polo already has a “blood in the water” match, but who’s to say that Stanford couldn’t revive the phrase with some bright red dye at the Avery Aquatics Center? The city of Chicago stains the Chicago River green every St. Patrick’s day, so I can’t imagine Northwestern would have to struggle too much to come up with the technology to dye the water at the Norris Aquatics Center purple. Alabama could bring a more authentic feel to their nickname “the Crimson Tide” with a bit of Party Pool red dye.
At times, swim meets can take themselves too seriously, and I think that this could be a brilliant way to lighten the atmosphere and make the sport more accessible to more people.
Yeah, I’m not positive about visibility either, especially in some of these pools that are two-meters deep. One of those chemical engineers from Stanford needs to work on it.
I missed the last link… thanks for pointing it out.
I’m still skeptical so far as seeing the bottom of the pool goes… but so long as that can be sorted out, I’ll support anything that has a chance of bringing public attention to our sport (outside of the existing swimming community)!
This will probably never happen… as if it wouldn’t be hard enough to dye an entire pool a different color, they would have to make sure that the lifeguards could still see the bottom, wouldn’t they? And would the dye react with all the other chemicals?
If you check the link to the Party Pool dye, it can be done safely, no damage to the filters or the chemicals, and it looks like for about $100 (to last 3-5 days) you could fill a 600,000 galon (50 meters x 25 meters x 2 meters deep) pool. Pictures seems to indicate that you can still see the bottom of the pool. It’s the stuff that they add to fountains and decorative pools to make the water look really blue.
Besides which…if they can dye a river…