Thanks to Shaw Sports Turf’s revolutionary synthetic turf system designed to the specific needs of softball, the game surface is evolving. Artificial isn’t a forgotten option anymore. B1K: Batting A Thousand ushers in a new generation of turf and along with it the next level of playability.
Shaw Sports Turf is the ONLY company in the synthetic turf industry with over 5 years of research and collecting data specific to our softball systems. Focusing on athlete, surface, and game science, we design fields that not only play like natural, but play like the surface the game should be played on.
Now really, let’s play ball.
B1K takes into account a few different testing metric to make the Shaw Sports Turf system the closest to natural playability that you can find, and can also be tuned to your field's specific needs.
Surface Performance:
Comparing both natural grass and synthetic turf field characteristics, Shaw Sports Turf set out to develop a method to evaluate a sfotball fields’ playability. Using a specially designed cannon to repl cate ball speeds and angles off the bat and off the surface, different types of data such as ball roll, pace and bounce were collected using high speed cameras along with other surface testing equipment.
SHAW SPORTS TURF’S SIGNATURE CANNON LEADS THE WAY AS AN INNOVATIVE BENCHMARKING TECHNIQUE. WE TEST FIELDS WITH OPTIMAL PLAYABILITY TO RAISE THE BAR FOR OUR NEW GENERATION OF SOFTBALL TURF, B1Kâ.
Ball Bounce Difference
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Athlete Performance:
Playability isn’t just about the surface alone; it’s also about an athlete’s interactions with it while performing the movements required by sport. Working with our university research partners, we were able to study those very movements in detail. Attaching sensors to record and analyze athletes on several different surface types, multiple synthetic systems as well as natural, revealed how the body reacts to each of them. For the benefit of the player, the surface should provide less energy rebound and less leg stiffness.
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Playability Assessment:
Shaw Sports Turf’s Playability Tool is a visual representation of data collected through a battery of standard tests that score a field based on how it measures on each. Research shows that what’s important to one sport’s performance, may not be as important to another. In the graph seen here, the better the field tests in the orange highlighted criteria, the better it is for softball.
