SportsTurf

March 2014

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.

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www.stma.org wanted to do sports turf as a career. After several years, my grads were getting good positions and they wanted interns. Many of them wanted to provide a better internship than they themselves had had. My students used to have many choices about where to go, but with other programs competing for them, this isn't so true anymore. This brings me to a problem I have with some places hiring several interns, in some cases more than ten, and working them in shifts to avoid pay- ing overtime. While I can certainly understand this from a business perspective, the students aren't getting the true experience of being one of the first to get there and last to leave, so to speak. Consequently, they really aren't finding out what they would be getting into career-wise. ST: Which former students have attained the most notoriety in sports turf management? Gilstrap: It has to be Heather Nabozny, who graduated in 1994 and became MLB's first female head groundskeeper with the Tigers in 1999, and 2008 grad Greg Elliott, who now has two rings (and big playoff checks) from being head groundskeeper with the San Francisco Giants. Both of them went straight to the big leagues from Class A teams. The 2012 World Series was the first time that both head groundskeepers were from the same program. They were set to reunite in SF if the series got to six games. I had USA Today and Fox Sports cued up, but the Tigers got swept and that story died. ST: What can sports turf managers do to continue advancing their professionalism in the eyes of the public? Gilstrap: They need to be more active in their communities. Reach out to local service clubs, who are always looking for speakers. Make a brief presentation and then field countless questions about caring for a lawn. Get to know reporters and give them your cell phone number. Wear clean clothes and be well groomed in case the cameras are rolling. Basically, promote yourself and you'll be helping market your organiza- tion. Your bosses will love it, and hopefully you'll be rewarded. ST: How did you get into turf? Gilstrap: Well, it took awhile since I spent 15 years trying to make it in the Austin music scene. One of the many day jobs I had was driv- ing a cab, and by happenstance it led me to an interview with a statewide lawn and garden distributor. I had gotten a general ag degree from a small cow college in Texas, which enabled me to know some- what about growing things. So, after a 15-year hiatus, I had a full-time job and said goodbye to the nightlife. I started out packaging vegetable seeds and then moved into sales. In looking through the catalog, I noticed several products that could be sold to the golf courses I'd been playing while a musician. I had success and garnered enough pull with the superintendents (mostly Aggies) to be elected to the board of the Texas Turfgrass Association. At my first meeting, Dr. Ed Runge, head of the Soil and Crop Sci- ences Department at A&M, apologized for not yet finding a suitable candidate for the fellowship that had been recently created by the asso- ciation. Feeling I needed another change in my life, I retook the GRE that I had first taken 17 years earlier. The results indicated that perhaps Continued on page 40

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