Facility&Operations | ByJoey Stevenson
Environmental management and employee safety
that?" This is the question I was asked nearly a year and half before the event would even take place. Knowing full well this was an opportunity the Indians organization couldn't pass up and an event that most likely no other groundskeeper would ever have the opportunity to tackle, I needed to make a few phone calls first.
"W
E WANT TO PUT A 5 MILLION POUND STRUC- TURE ON THE BASEBALL FIELD, are you ok with
the West Coast we felt confident about the field, but what about the weather in Indianapolis in Jan- uary and February? The events were the 2012 Di- recTV Celebrity Beach bowl, followed by invite-only Super Bowl party, and post-game Super Bowl party for the New England Patriots. The best case for this event was the time we had to plan and Indians front office including the groundkeeper in all the field-related decisions. Oh and not to forget, the structure, a portable airplane hangar, would need to be trucked in through the grounds area with only a height of 11' 4" piece by piece by piece. When completed the structure would stand 372 feet long x 164 feet wide x 66 feet tall. Not exactly "portable." It would take nearly 3 weeks to setup and 3 weeks to tear down for roughly 10 hours of use. Since we knew this structure would only be setup on the outfield turf and the field would be replaced entirely, we got a head start on our renova- tion during the fall before the Super Bowl. Also knowing we only had about a window of 2 weeks to replace the field in the spring, the bulk of the work had to be done before the event. In the fall we sod cut, by hand, the old turf roughly 20,000 sq. ft. and donated to a local golf course. We then removed 3-4 inches of old contaminated sand and the 7-inch column of infield mix that had built up
Much like the setup for a Supercross event on 26 SportsTurf | October 2012 www.sportsturfonline.com
