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/282941
tice facilities, where the two Super Bowl teams trained for what rou- tinely is television's most-watched American sporting event. Regardless of the climate, the crew was composed, as it normally is, of groundskeepers who've been on Super Bowl duty for many years and even decades and who, much like the athletes, are team players. They included men and women recruited from the National Football League, Major League Baseball, college football, an Ala- bama turf farm, The Toro Company, and even two professionals from Japan and an Iowa State University senior majoring in horti- culture. "The Seahawks won the game, but the crew members, in my book, were also Super Bowl champions," said George Toma, who knows of what he speaks, having now worked every Super Bowl since the inaugural one in 1967. Toma is retired from a long, full-time groundskeeping career, primarily with the Kansas City Roy- als. But he's drawn back to the turf for baseball's spring train- ing and such highlight events as the Super Bowl, whose crew he once supervised. That job now belongs to Ed Mangan of the Atlanta Braves. "This year was prob- ably the most challeng- ing [Super Bowl] on so many fronts, and they did an unbelievable job maintaining that field and getting it to perform the way it did," said NFL director of event operations Eric Finkelstein. The league, he explained, selects crew members who are "the best of the best." While it's the biggest of the big games, the Super Bowl has com- pany at the NFL's summit. Other important dates drawing the cream of the league's landscaping crop include the annual Pro Bowl exhibition and the regular-season contests played overseas. For 2013, that meant two games in London's Wembley Stadium; three are scheduled there for 2014. Absent conflicts with their full-time jobs, most Super Bowl crew members work those special NFL dates, too. Everyone must be a jack-of-all-trades, doing "a little bit of every- thing" to help whip the sites into shape, said Lee Keller, the Univer- sity of Vermont's athletic turf manager for whom New Jersey was his 15th Super Bowl. For the Super Bowl, that means, primarily, tending to the turf throughout the weeks of preparation, along with a heavy dose of painting: of the yard-lines and their numerical designations; team names; and NFL, AFC, NFC and Super Bowl trophy logos. Getting it all done involves emptying much of the warehouse where the equipment is stored for shipment to the Super Bowl site. The items include standard gardening and carpentry tools, like rakes, shovels, brooms and drills; machines, such as motorized carts and sod cutters, and even end zone and sideline pylons. The artistic-design side requires an abundance of supplies, too, such as multiple 5-gallon pails of specialized field paint, rails, boards to mark the lines, stencils of the numerals and hash marks, and turbine blowers to dry paint. Painting the teams' names and the conferences' logos in the end zones means having four stencils on- site, not two, since the shipment typically reaches the Super Bowl venue before the AFC and NFC championship games. The frigid tempera- tures and snow in the days leading up to the Broncos-Seahawks matchup necessitated un- usual measures. Heated tents were put up to pre- vent the paint from freez- ing as it was being applied. The Saturday night before Sunday's game, the artificial turf field was covered and heat blown under the tar- paulin to assure excellent on-field conditions. The planning began as far back as last year's Super Bowl in New Orleans's weather- neutral Superdome, several groundskeepers said. The preparations also included such micro issues as preparing the supply list, since departing and re-entering the game and prac- tice sites involves security-related, hours-wasting delays. "To leave the stadium to get a gallon of paint striper, paint rollers or sandpaper takes so much time, so we bring a lot of that stuff with us. If we need 'em, we got 'em," Keller said. Getting the field ready is complicated by other Super Bowl-spe- cific schedules. While sports' great appeal lies in its unscripted na- ture, so much about the Big Game's sidelights is choreographed. The pre-game, half-time and post-game shows are the products of rehearsals—not just of the musical performances, but also to swiftly erect and deconstruct the television, trophy-presentation and con- cert stages. Sometimes, faux fields for that purpose are painted with preci- sion in the host park's parking lots. At MetLife Stadium, that wasn't the case, so the field guardians had to work cooperatively with the entertainment and television producers. April 2014 | SportsTurf 15 www.stma.org Left: Lee Keller, University of Vermont, painting an end zone. Right: Terry Lee, George Toma, Gerald Anderson, & Randy Baker in frigid New Jersey.