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: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/266752
March 2014 | SportsTurf 41 www.stma.org agreed to sponsor me, and the fact that I didn't need a stipend or tu- ition paid for probably helped that decision. During my first fall in East Lansing, I met Paula Manderfield. She was a district judge, and we were married within 2 years. We then had three children, with the last two being twins that required my wife to be on bed rest for the last 5 months of the pregnancy. So, I was caring for her and our 18-month-old daughter. Then, about a year after the twins were born, she decided to run for circuit court, in which she came in first against two incumbents and a sitting state representative. I had never been in a big campaign like that, but think goodness she had. It was a great experience, and I think my 2 years I'd worked as a roadie really helped our drive and perseverance. So, all along I'm taking a course each semester and putting out treatments all summer and fall. Vargas's grad student ahead of me, Rob Golembiewski, now with Bayer, was in the process of documenting the first instances of dollar spot resistance to DMI fungicides and how to manage it. I helped him finish up and then started a study to try and determine how long it would take for the same resistance to de- velop in a virgin sward, so to speak. After 5 years of spraying Banner at 4x rates four times a year, I did see enough of a shift that my committee approved me going forward with writing my thesis. After awhile my wife said she was tired of hear- ing about it and that I should either get the thing done or forget about it. With that blessing, I focused on my writing and often slept in my office when I was on a roll. Looking back at the qualifying written and oral exams, and espe- cially at the oral defense of the thesis, I think that getting through the process, particularly for a terminal degree, is a form of intellectual haz- ing. At any rate, I finally got my Ph D in 2007, and 6 months later I doubt if more than a handful of people in my department even knew what I had done it on. At any rate, I had finally joined the club, so to speak, at 59 years of age and I'm glad I persevered. ST: What accomplishments in your career make you the most proud? Gilstrap: My first answer has to the successes of my students both on and off the field. Back in 1993, there were only a handful of people in sports turf that I knew had formal turf educations. So I began my quest of putting more of them into and onto the field. By the early 2000s, I was making the claim that MSU had more graduates in the industry than all the other states' programs combined. While this is no longer the case since nearly all the other turf programs have and have had at least some sports turf students, I will say that MSU still has the most out there. Also, I volunteered to be the director of our dual degree program with four Chinese universities. I took it from its inception in 2003 through graduating its first class in 2008. It was our university presi- dent's idea and she chose turf to be the guinea pig. It's still going on and has more than 400 grads, some of which are actually working on golf courses in China. Finally, I'm still continuing to research the bermudagrass that was brought to MSU by W. J. Beal as part of the nation's first turfgrass re- search in the 1880s. It's now spread throughout the campus and looks quite good where it's mowed regularly and fertilized. The cultivar has been documented in the scientific literature as being the most cold tol- erant. Through DNA fingerprinting, I've discovered that it is a clone. This means it has the potential to be patented, and I'm working toward securing the funding to do that. ST: Do you have any major career disappointments? Gilstrap: Sure I do, and not being able to recruit and graduate more students tops the list. My incoming class sizes ranged from eighteen to six. My graduating class size ranged from twelve to five. I had greater attrition with the larger groups because I wasn't giving all of them the attention they needed. With the smaller classes, I did my best to make sure none of them fell by the wayside. Also, I regret not leaving a pro- gram big enough that it necessitates its own coordinator, instead of the shared model it's going to. ST: Is there something you wish you had done that you did not? Gilstrap: I know I should have published more, but I was lazy in this regard since it didn't count much in my year-end evaluations be- cause I didn't have a research appointment. ST: What are your plans in retirement? Gilstrap: First, of all I'm not retiring! My kids are 16, 14, and 14. So, how can I? Instead, I'm moving to a 9-month appointment with my primary duties being the teaching of an online course entitled World of Turf, which I designed and developed it for non-turf stu- dents across the campus. Enrollment numbers have grown remarkably since I shifted the format to an entirely online offering. In fact I have 300 students taking the course this spring. ST: What about the program's future? Gilstrap: Coordination of the sports turf program will transition to Dr. Trey Rogers, who has been in charge of the highly successful 2-year golf turf management program since the late eighties. Dr. Rogers has been a leader in sports turf research having pioneered and perfected the portable field concept. He has assured me and wants all of our gradu- ates to be secure in knowing that the two programs will remain sepa- rate, and that the only change that may take place is that the commercial turf part of the program's name may be dropped, since the primary interest of its students lately has indeed been on the sports side. ST: What's the greatest challenge facing the STMA as an organization? Gilstrap: In my opinion, the STMA is conspicuously incomplete or it's fractured at best. This is because the MLB and the NFL have their own distinctly separate meetings, and for this reason many of them don't attend the STMA conference and consequently, some of them are no longer members, if they ever were. You don't hear about the superintendents who host PGA Tour events going off and meeting by themselves instead of attending the Golf Industry Show. So, until the STMA can figure out how to get as many of the elite practitioners as possible to participate, the organization can't be truly representative of the profession. n