Irrigation&Drainage
Improving baseball field drainage
MATT JOHNSON, ASSISTANT HEAD GROUNDSKEEPER, Toronto Blue Jays/Florida Operations I work on five fields at our complex here
in Dunedin and to the best of my knowl- edge originally there was no drainage at all on any of them. Field 1 is used mostly by high schoolers and younger teams and it drains well. Our main field for the Blue Jays, #2, had poor drainage, especially in
the outfield; any rain at all and it would be so soaked we couldn’t mow it. Fields 3 and 4 have some spots that stay
wet for awhile but mostly have average drainage, depending on the weather of course. Field 5 remains a problem but I hope in the future we will get the same system for drainage on it as we now have on #2. My boss, Pat Skunda, and I knew that we had to get drainage into Field 2. We
Our staff had to physically move water around in the grass areas to try and play games after our traditional afternoon thunderstorms.
tried aerifying and slicing more; we tried drilling holes into the outfield and putting pea stone at the bottom filled with sand to try and get water to percolate better. Noth- ing worked. When we attended the STMA Confer-
ence in Orlando in January 2010 my goal was to first learn as much as I could and second, to find a good drainage system. I knew all about drainage tile and had heard that after a period of time those drains stop working. In Orlando I met Jim Surrell of Hydraway who said he would give me a lifetime guarantee on his product. I did my research and came to the conclusion that it was the best product for me to use. Munie Greencare came to install half of the outfield and the day they finished that it rained pretty hard, a few inches. Normally, I wouldn’t be able to mow that part of the field for days. I mowed the next morning. At the end of the season Munie came to fin- ish the field. We had a little bit left over and we had Dave Laub from landscaping put
40 SportsTurf | April 2011
www.sportsturfonline.com
