SportsTurf

SportsTurf March 2011

SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.

Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/26719

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 42 of 59

As a company we are focused on moisture management. If you have too much, we can reduce it, if you don’t have enough, we can help you hold onto more. The goal of our products is to intensify the effects of calcined clays, vitrified clays, etc.; we just want to make them better. base in West Texas. At that time, we were de- veloping another product called Ready Play Dry Mats to remove standing water from skinned areas, or even turf. These Dry Mats are infused with our patented technology and ab- sorb 2 gallons of standing water off any sur- face. The reusable Dry Mats immediately drew the interest of multiple industries. I knew I had something pretty cool when a friend’s base- ment flooded, and we used our Dry Mats to help clean it up. While creating the “drying” agents, we al- tered the technology a little bit, and created a third product, Field Magic, a complement to the Surface Dry product. Where the latter takes your field from soaked and muddy to playable, the former keeps your field from be- coming dry and dusty. Field Magic is incorpo- rated into the existing soil, and holds moisture in the soil profile for an extended period of time. This all transpired in only 3 months! I took the products to two friends, Andy Larned and Todd Naff, both of whom had played profes- sional baseball. They agreed we had to get these products in front of an industry expert. The three of us knew what a baseball field was supposed to feel like, but we had no idea how to create that feel. Clay Wood, head groundskeeper of the Oakland A’s, and I both grew up in Boulder, CO and he was a good friend of my cousin. So Andy and I arranged to meet with Clay in late October, in Oakland, and he was intrigued with what the products could do. He called Mark Razum, head groundskeeper for the Col- orado Rockies, and they agreed the best way to evaluate their performance was to incorpo- rate some product into one of the spring train- ing fields at Papago Park in Phoenix. After we incorporated Field Magic into the playing sur- face, Razum put out the equivalent of a 2-inch www.stma.org SportsTurf 43 >> CHAD HUSS, the Oakland A’s spring training groundskeeper, put Ready Play technology on top of overseeding on a field in Phoenix, which is shown on the right side of this photo, taken 11 days after the overseeding. He said he was able to get a stronger, denser grass with less water on the treated area. rain on the field. Someone said that there was no way we would get on the field for at least a day. We went to lunch, and upon our return the field was ready for play. At that point, Clay and Mark became believers in this technology. As a company we are focused on moisture management. If you have too much, we can re- duce it, if you don’t have enough, we can help you hold onto more. The goal of our products is to intensify the effects of calcined clays, vitrified clays, etc.; we just want to make them better. Our products are available nationally through Ewing Irrigation, BWI, Hisco Compa- nies, Fairmount Minerals, Pro Chem Sales, G & S Solutions, Cisco Companies, Trupoint, and Gail Materials.■

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of SportsTurf - SportsTurf March 2011