Due to the heavy rainfall this afternoon, the new LZHS football field experienced heavy pooling along the sidelines. However, that is how the field is designed to work.

“Any field, whether it’s a brand new one like this, if you had as much rain as we did in that short amount of time, this is what will happen,” Ryan Rubenstein, assistant principal for student activities and facilities, said. “If it was a steady rain, where it’s not as hard as it was, then the field will do what it is supposed to do, and you will never have pooling like this. It’s just the fact that we had probably an inch of rain in the matter of 15 minutes.”

Before being replaced during this past summer, the original football field had no known type of a drainage system, according to Rubenstein. The design of the new field specifically addressed the lack of a drainage system. Along with replacing the field, an addition of a retention pond was dug out in between the tennis court and the visitor’s side of the football field.

“There are pipes underneath [the field] basically between the soccer lines and the football side lines. The pipes run [the length of the field] on this side and exactly the same on the other side. They come up on an angle, and then everything goes down into that area,” Rubenstein said. “[The water] flows [away from the field] into a bigger pipe that goes into the retention area.”

According to Rubenstein, the pooling of the water on the sidelines diminished quickly after the rain stopped.
“When you get that much amount of rain in a short time, there’s no place for it to go,” Rolando Vazquez, athletic director, said. “It just needs time.”