Good drainage base + the perfect soil texture ratios + appropriate grass seed it can be achieved. No I don't know of a single example in the CRD, but it can be done, all the grass sports fields in the CRD suck. No not 24.7/365 Maybe 320/10 hours a day which would be probably the most the field would be used. Crumb rubber is not maintenance-free and crumb rubber and needs to be re-topped from time to time.
Sorry Todd but your have your facts wrong.
Firstly, I never said artificial turf was, "maintenance-free".
Second, the ration of hours of use to hours of maintenance is vastly different for grass vs turf. This means that grass cannot be used for a significantly greater time than turf.
From the Center for Turfgrass Science at Penn State:
There is a limit to the amount of traffic that even the best managed [grass] turf can withstand without excessive injury. This must be recognized if frequent costly repairs are to be avoided. Some of the things that often can be done to reduce injury are:
- Schedule a minimum of use when fields are wet.
- Rotate play areas, where size of area permits, to provide a resting and recovery period for turf showing the effects of wear.
- Avoid concentrated trampling, such as practicing band formations, whenever possible.
- Limit or withhold use of newly seeded areas until a mature turf has developed.
- Avoid use of the field in the spring until the turf has had an opportunity to recover from winter dormancy.
- Keep off the area when there has been surface thawing of frozen turf.
Mechanical raking of turf fields takes nowhere near as much time as all the above.