San Diego FC continues maybe the most important stretch of games in its young history, with the second of three straight home dates and the third of five in the month of May at Snapdragon Stadium. Saturday’s opponent at 7:30 p.m. is Sporting KC, which currently sits in 13th place in the 15-team Western Conference and has won just once in its last four outings. The schedule stiffens considerably over the back half of the season. “Good teams win at home,” goalkeeper CJ Dos Santos said. “This is a really important time for us, especially to take advantage of these home matches to gain as many points as possible going into the tougher games, the longer road trips in the summer and the playoff push in the fall.” The only downside of playing on their home field might be, well, the field. It is beginning to show signs of stress. This is not a new development at Snapdragon Stadium, which opened in 2022 and has struggled to maintain pristine turf conditions as the facility has added tenants and events. Last fall, the San Diego Wave women’s pro soccer team scrapped a home game and played at Racing Louisville instead because, according to a club statement, “the current field conditions … have not met the standards required for a safe playing environment.” The Snapdragon grass hasn’t devolved to quite that state, but it wasn’t exactly a pool table for SDFC’s 2-0 win against the Colorado Rapids last Saturday. “We actually talked about it after the last game,” SDFC captain Jeppe Tverskov said. “You kind of feel it, especially progressing through the game. It gets a little loose. There’s a lot of sand already put on the pitch, which probably would mean not that it’s struggling but a couple games maybe too much on it, I don’t know. “We are still able to play the way we want right now, so it’s not like it’s a bad pitch. We don’t complain as of yet. But we noticed. It feels like the top of it easily goes off.” Saturday is the fifth of seven soccer games in a 23-day stretch — May 3, 14, 17 and 24 by SDFC, May 4, 10 and 25 by the Wave. And imagine if the San Diego Legion pro rugby team, which called Snapdragon Stadium home for the previous two years, had not moved to USD’s Torero Stadium for its 2025 spring season. (It had home games the past two weekends.) “We are in close communication with San Diego FC, working together to provide the best pitch possible given the heavy match schedule this month,” a statement from the Oak View Group, which manages the facility and its field for San Diego State, the stadium owner. “We have also experienced some unseasonably cool weather over the past month, but our investment in grow lights has helped improve the playing surface significantly.” SDFC coach Mikey Varas remained diplomatic Friday following practice at the club’s East County complex, which does look like a pool table. “Our training field is amazing; the stadium field can improve,” Varas said. “I think I’ll probably just leave it that it can get better and we’re working with San Diego State to make those improvements from a details perspective. With our style of play, it’s really important that the quality of turf is good.” Varas prefers a high-risk, high-reward approach, controlling possession and pushing bodies forward to pin the opponent in its own half. That works best on a flat, smooth, predictable surface, where there are no surprises with unexpected bounces or hops. Lose your footing, lose the ball, and suddenly the other team is racing toward your goal with numbers. “What we ask of these guys is already really, really hard,” he said. “So a really, really great field gives us a huge advantage. When the field is not great, it gives the opponent the advantage.” There’s little respite in sight. Major League Soccer takes a break in June for the CONCACAF Gold Cup for men’s national teams, but there are six events that month: two Wave games, a June 15 Concacaf Gold Cup doubleheader, a June 20 exhibition between SDFC and Mexico City’s Club America, and a June 26 Shakira concert where the grass will be covered for several days. The real test will come later in the summer. There are three games in six days in late August between SDFC, the Wave and SDSU football, then four games in nine days in mid-September. There’s also the potential for fixture congestion in November if either soccer team makes the playoffs (and both are trending that way). Mid-October was when the field degraded last year, drawing criticism from Wave interim head coach Landon Donovan. Two weeks later, the club moved its Nov. 3 home game to Louisville. The stadium typically has installed a hearty Latitude 36 Bermudagrass turf but opted to switch to Kentucky bluegrass in late September in an unplanned re-sodding. It never fully took, and a few weeks later it was a bumpy, unsightly mess with huge patches of sand. “This is the busiest stadium in America, there’s no doubt in my mind,” Mike Kerns, the Oak View Group’s director of fields and grounds, told the Union-Tribune last October. “We’re doing our best. … Everybody has an opinion on what we do on a day-to-day basis on how it should be done, but nobody does it on an everyday basis. “People think we don’t care. No, we probably care more than you think on behind-the-scenes stuff. Everybody wants to be a turf manager or a politician until it’s time to come to work, you know?” The bluegrass was replaced with Latitude 36 Bermundagrass after the motocross events in January, the eighth re-sodding in the stadium’s 2½-year history. It held up through the March and April start of the soccer season but appeared to deteriorate in recent weeks. Following last Saturday’s game, SDFC initiated a “feedback loop” from players and staff to stadium officials with the goal of improving field conditions. “We’re in a partnership with San Diego State,” Varas said. “We believe that all of us are in this with the same objectives in mind. Right now, it’s about giving feedback week in, week out. They’re open to it. … It’s about pushing the envelope. It’s also about understanding that we’re in this together.”