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/433388
28 SportsTurf | December 2014 www.sportsturfonline.com Facility & Operations walk-behind mowers, all made by Toro. They also use a Pro Core 648 aerator, a Gehl skid loader, a 5800 Multi-Pro sprayer with a 20-ft. boom, several utility vehicles and three John Deere utility tractors. Toro Sand Pro equipment is used to groom clay surfaces and warning tracks. Boettcher and Warczak also draw upon their educational and career experiences in managing Miller Park. Boettcher received his BS degree in Horticulture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. His studies focused primarily on sports turf and landscape management. Boettcher served an internship with the Milwaukee Brewers when he was a student and another internship for the Boston Red Sox just before graduating from UW. He then took a job as a landscaping foreman at Wisconsin's McKay Nursery. He worked as a herd manager for a purebred Angus farm before returning to sports turf in 2009 when he landed the second assistant landscaper manager position at Miller Park. Originally from Osseo, WI Boettcher grew up on a family-owned beef cow/calf operation. "I grew up loving the land and agriculture. I like natural grass because of the connection of working the land and cultivating a crop. The smell of the soil is incredible after we do an aera- tion," he says of the field at Miller Park. Warczak grew up in Oshkosh, WI and got his degree in golf course management from Anoka-Hennepin in Minnesota in 2006. He played baseball in high school and began working for free for the Midwest League's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers at the Fox Cities Stadium in Appleton, Wisconsin. Warczak was eventually hired as assistant groundskeeper, and at the end of the 2007 season, became head groundskeeper of the Neuroscience Group Field at the Fox Cities Stadium. In 2008, his field won the Sports Turf Managers Association Professional Baseball Field of the Year. Warczak was hired by the Brewers as grounds manager at Miller Park last February. "It's nice working your way up from high school to the minor leagues and then to the major leagues," Warczak says. There are many more resources available to grounds managers in the major league, he notes. "In the minor leagues, you have to be creative and use the same equipment for multiple purposes." There is another benefit, and Warczak smiles as he says, "With the roof at Miller Park, there are not as many tarp pulls." Boettcher and Warczak belong to both the STMA and Wisconsin's STMA. Membership in these organizations, they say, enables them to share knowledge, successes and failures with their peers; and to stay abreast of the industry's latest research findings and innovations. ■ Lynn Grooms is an independent writer living in Mt. Horeb, WI. Like Michael Boettcher, she is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison.