After 25 years of coaching soccer, Dr. Mimi Nartey has spent countless hours on natural grass fields, synthetic turf fields, and nearly every surface in between.

That experience made her reaction to Wiseburn Da Vinci High School's new Pivot® field particularly noteworthy.

"I think we're getting a level of performance that's very similar to playing on a natural grass surface," she said after her teams began training and competing on the new field.

For a sport where ball movement, footing, and surface consistency can influence every aspect of the game, that observation speaks to the challenge that shaped Pivot's development.

Developed at the Center for Turf Innovation (CTI), Pivot was created to better understand how athletes interact with the surface beneath them and how those interactions influence performance.

Researchers combined laboratory testing, biomechanical analysis, and athlete feedback collected from college and professional players. The goal was to develop a turf system capable of delivering the playing characteristics athletes associate with high-quality natural grass while simplifying the long-term management of the field itself.

Unlike conventional turf systems, Pivot does not rely on performance infill. Instead, many of the surface characteristics traditionally influenced by infill are built directly into the turf structure.

The development process extended far beyond controlled testing environments. As part of the research program, CTI worked with professional athletes and partnered with PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands to study athlete-surface interaction and ball behavior under real playing conditions.

Those insights helped refine how the surface responds not only to players, but also to the movement of the ball, an important consideration for sports such as soccer where consistency can influence every phase of play.

At Wiseburn Da Vinci High School, the new field now serves student-athletes across multiple programs while providing a reliable surface for year-round activity.

For coaches and players, the value of a field is ultimately measured through daily use. Training sessions, matches, and countless hours of repetition shape how athletes experience the surface beneath them.

The early feedback from Da Vinci's soccer program suggests that the work carried out at CTI is translating into meaningful results on the field. And for a coach with decades of experience across a wide range of playing surfaces, that observation carries weight.