Design Guide for Lighting a Sports Field

From soccer fields and baseball diamonds to sports fields, tennis courts, and basketball courts, powerful field and stadium lights along with narrow beam flood lighting are used to support safety and extend usable hours. This lighting needs to be adaptable and convenient, providing access to a variety of activities while offering flexible hours. They can be just the thing to revive a community and generate a sense of camaraderie, so they’re always worth investing in.

And, although many different factors account for how good a sports facility is, the unsung hero of the bunch is lighting. Lighting doesn’t just provide effective visibility for participants and spectators. It also provides a feeling of safety at night. Lighting is becoming an increasingly important element in the renovation of sports facilities and the design of new ones.

In addition to this, sports facility lighting also needs to be designed with the surrounding community in mind. Although you want the light as bright as possible, you don’t want any light pollution to negatively impact the facility’s neighbors.

The way a local field or tennis court is illuminated can have a dramatic effect on those who live near it. To help you plan sports lighting that accomplishes all the tasks listed above, without infringing on the lives of the people who live near it, we’ve put together a lighting guide below for both professional and recreational sports facilities.

What You Need to Know to Design Sport’s Facility Lighting

How Will the Facility Be Used?

This is perhaps the most important thing to know. Different sports require different light levels, and if your sports facility will host a variety of different sports, then your lighting needs to be able to support that as well. Sports played with smaller balls will require higher light levels. Generally, we recommend 20 fc for outdoor tennis but only 7.5 fc for soccer. In addition to the type of sport, you’ll need to consider whether or not the games played there will be televised or draw a crowd.

Both of these situations present different lighting challenges that should be addressed during planning. The sports lighting you choose should be suitable for both players and spectators and offer different values for light balance, glare, and quality of lighting (CRI), depending on the sport.  Lower color rendering and uniformity are acceptable for purely recreational facilities, but if there are cameras in use, you’ll want to pay much closer attention to these values.

What Will the Facility Activity Levels Be?

This may not seem like it’s related to light, but in a roundabout way, it is extremely important. The facility’s capacity and the spectator area will of course affect your lighting plan, but the most important thing to look at here is the burning hours per year of a facility. This will have a big impact on light maintenance.

We always recommend LEDs because they are superior, energy-efficient bulbs. But their long lifespan is the real shining star here. For sports facilities that are in use year-round, you must have a bulb with a long life. Changing these lights is often a hassle and requires that the facility be temporarily shut down or must be done at odd hours. It also requires expensive equipment, which can make it an expensive endeavor.

The less often you must do this, the better. And, for these reasons, we think that LEDs are the clear choice. Not only is their lifespan much longer, but their lumens remain at a consistent shine for about 70% of the bulb’s life. So, you’ll have a long-lasting bulb with a consistent shine for 50,000 hours, on average.

Are There Any Environmental Constraints?

As we mentioned above, the lighting of outdoor sports facilities has a significant effect on the surrounding environment. For this reason, if your sports lighting is for outdoor use, you’ll need to survey the surrounding setting, and in most cases, take steps to control light spills. This is especially important if you’re near residential streets.

In addition to this, you’ll need to consider any obstacles such as furniture, masts, catwalks, stands, other metal structures, etc. These can block light and should therefore be considered when you are developing your lighting plan. Finally, you should think about the sports and activities performed there and designate any “safe zones” to ensure that you don’t install lights in these areas.

Lighting the Field of Play

Horizontal Illuminance

Horizontal Illuminance describes how much light reaches a horizontal surface. A sports field is an example of a horizontal surface.

The light levels on a horizontal plane are measured by horizontal illuminance at the ground level. Its primary role is to deliver a bright playing surface that can be properly viewed by players, spectators, and officials.

For non-televised events, an average horizontal illuminance of between 20-50 foot candles is a good target. For televised events, horizontal illuminance takes a back seat to vertical illuminance level. This ensures the televised picture is balanced and not overexposed.  For this reason, instead of a specific foot candle target, you should focus on the ratio of the two illuminance types. This ratio should be as close as possible and not exceed a 0.5 to 2 ratio of horizontal vs vertical illuminance.

Uniformity

In any sporting event, it’s extremely important to establish a level and balanced field of play. And one of the ways to do this is to provide uniform lighting. Even distribution ensures that there are no dark spots or poorly lit areas on the field of play. Uniformity is expressed as:

• Min / Max ratio – the minimum foot candle measurement / the highest foot candle measurement
• Avg / Min ratio – the average foot candle measurement / the minimum foot candle measurement

Uniformity, by itself, is as important to light levels. Nothing is worse than playing on an unbalanced playing field, for athletes and spectators alike. Even if it’s a middle school game, you can’t help but notice how bad unbalanced lighting is as players move from bright to dark sections of the field.

A target of less than 2.0 (avg/min ratio) is recommended.

Vertical Illuminance

For sporting facilities, vertical surfaces typically include players, goalposts, and officials. All of which are extremely important to view the game.

Vertical illuminance not only highlights the players but also whatever ball they’re using. In order to provide the best visuals and make it possible for the human eye to identify players regardless of direction, you measure vertical illuminance at a height between 48″ and 72″ high.

Even though this is an important aspect of lighting, for most sporting events, there isn’t a required vertical illuminance level. This is because of the complex relationship between horizontal and vertical illuminance. In these cases, you’ll only need to ensure that the horizontal lighting level is correct and apply the ratio we mentioned above. However, if the event is televised, we recommend an average vertical illuminance of somewhere at 100+ foot candles.

Glare Reduction

At some point or another, everyone has seen the effects of glare caused by lighting. Prolonged exposure to glare has been associated with some health issues. It’s for these reasons that the International Commission on Illumination has developed a glare evaluation system specifically for outdoor sports applications.

The CIE 112 Glare Evaluation System outlines a glare rating (GR) scale starting at 10 to an upper end of 90. With this scale, low scores are better. A UGR value of 50 or less is good for sports fields.

Color Properties

The color properties of lights are measured in two different methods.

1. Kelvin (Color Temperature): This refers to the color appearance of the light, i.e., warm or cool. Typically LED lights are cool-toned, but they offer a huge range of customizations, so you can achieve any color temperature. For a sporting field, 4000K and 5000K are recommended.
2. CRI (Color Rendering Index):  This is a measurement of the quality of light. LEDs are excellent at producing high-quality light. An LED’s CRI starts in the 70 range (the total range is 0-100). LEDs are capable of 98 CRI, but this type of CRI level is more expensive.

Flicker

This consideration is essentially exclusive to televised events and especially important for sporting events. This is because anytime a play is shown in slow motion if your lights are flickering at all, there will be noticeable interference with the replay. Keep in mind that although the eye may not be able to pick up flickering at a certain rate, a camera absolutely can.

Flicker is almost a non-issue with LED. Because they are DC-powered lights (the LED drivers convert AC to DC), they do not flicker. Other traditional light sources can’t compete when it comes to flickering.

Safety Lighting for Players

Pretty much any sport becomes dangerous if not played under the right lighting, but for certain activities, it can quickly become deadly. Having adequate safety lighting for players isn’t only important; it’s absolutely essential. If your facility does not have this, it should not be hosting any sporting events. Safety lighting isn’t designed to facilitate the tempo of the game, but rather to act as a backup if the normal lighting fails or experiences a temporary power shortage.

Other CRItical Considerations

Waterproof and Dustproof

Fixtures installed outdoors need to be protected from the elements. IP (Ingress Protection) is a scale designed to measure how well a fixture can be kept safe from dust and water. The higher the IP rating, the better the protection it has against dust and water.

Surge Protection

Surge Protection is the ability of a fixture to survive an electrical surge. A surge protector can absorb a surge before it can damage the internal lighting components. Surge protectors have different ratings and abilities. They are designed to absorb different levels of surges. It’s important to note that even the best surge protection cannot survive a direct lightning strike but can survive a nearby lightning strike.

Impact Resistance

It is critical to ensure that the lights continue to work if they are struck by balls and/or other objects. When choosing fixtures for outdoor sports fields, you want to pay attention to the fixture’s IK rating. IK Codes refer to the level of protection available from external mechanical impacts.

Therefore, IK Codes for outdoor light fixtures are important so your fixture can survive the occasional strike from a ball or object. IK codes range from IK00 to IK10. The higher the IK rating, the better its impact protection resistance.

LEDs are Lighting the Way

By now, hopefully, you realize that a great lighting system does more than just illuminate the field of play. Among many other things, good lighting should also make visitors more relaxed in the environment and ensure a clear and effective television broadcast for audiences watching remotely. But beyond those general guidelines, sports lighting is quite complex.

International, national, regional, and local competitions all have their different lighting requirements and recreational sports call for different lighting schemes than competitive and professional events do. In addition to this, a facility’s capacity and the distance from which spectators are viewing the action also affect the lighting.

The best way to meet all these challenges is with LED lighting. From their energy efficiency to their high-quality shine, LEDs are a favorite for sports lighting all over the world. They help manage your bottom line by cutting electrical costs and their more durable composition keeps them safe from swinging rackets and flying balls. In addition to this, LED Sport Fixture offers fixtures with a wide range of color temperatures and CRI, so that you can ensure that, if your sporting event hosts televised events, they’ll be seen in their best light by viewers at home.

We offer free lighting plans for our industrial, commercial, and sports lighting customers

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