As my boys age, they're getting dang hard on the yard. They've got two areas where they, and the neighborhood boys play sports, and they've about got it beat down to dirt.

We've got a really nice Bermuda yard with no weeds, but in the wintertime when it goes dormant its brittle and they just trample it. One spot in the front is going on two years and is probably toast already for this year.

Would planting some kind of rye grass in the fall help give a barrier to help protect the Bermuda? I use a local company to handle the yard treatments.

Lock em in the closet?

Get them a PS5

Yards are stupid.
I'd encourage them to continue to play outside and be thankful they don't stay locked in the basement playing video games.

This is true, we try to balance the video games because they do love them.

Wife got on my case about the grass, and that's pretty much what I told her. Said if you want a nice yard, gotta keep'em off it.

Just be glad they are outside playing. I made the remark to my wife a while back that You could drive through our town and never see a kid outside playing. Pretty sad. They`ll grow out of it one day and you`ll remember the time when they did play outside and not playing on Xbox or looking at their I-Phone.

But........In the meantime, I wouldn`t worry. You can`t kill Bermuda. Fertilize and water and it`ll be fine. You might aerate where they play though to offset compaction.

let em play. Fix it when they leave

and Derek can answer the overseeding, but it seems like a good idea

Put turf down

I remember wearing a bike path around the inside perimeter of my parent yard, we pretended it was a motocross track. Later we wore a basketball court into the dirt after my pops put up a goal. they didn’t care about the backyard at all.

TO H-LL WITH THE GRASS!
Kids need more of what us 50s kids have...
Mom yelling at us at 8am "GET THE H-LL OUT OF THE HOUSE AND DON'T COME BACK UNTIL SUPPER TIME!"

do like my parents did, make them play in the street.

Allow the stickers to grow.

Astro turf

Here at work, we had a path that many people had made over the years (myself included) due to the lack of a sidewalk directly connecting our building to the parking lot to the side of the building. There was a sidewalk attached to the building, but accessing it was a bit indirect (completely indirect), but most cut through the grass. To answer your question yes, the rye grass helped protect the St Augustine and kept it from just becoming dirt. I'm not sure what type of rye was used, but I can try to ask one of the guys over our landscaping department and find out.

My kid wore a motocross trail in our yard when he was about 5 on a PW50. It was one of his greatest accomplishments. I can drive by that house today and still see remnants of that trail 30+ years later.