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/34725
Facility&Operations | Hal Phillips Will outsourcing become the new normal? Editor’s note: Hal Phillips is a writer for Mandarin Media, a worldwide public relations firm, here representing Lohmann Sports Fields. W HEN LEO PECHETTE arrived at Lakes Community High School in the exurbs northwest of Chicago, he thought he’d stepped into a grounds manager’s dream. It was the fall of 2003, and this brand new high school had just seeded its brand-spanking-new football field. Nearly every grounds man- ager looks upon an inherited athletic field with some meas- ure of trepidation: How old is the irrigation system really, and how sophisticated were the original construction tech- niques? How often has the fa- cility been aerated, if at all? Where exactly are the drainage trouble spots, and how does the field generally bounce back from heavy rains, especially be- tween the hash marks? Pechette had plenty of wor- ries at the start in ramping up all the athletic facilities serving a brand new high school. But the new football field shouldn’t have been among them. Indeed, because Lakes Com- munity High was a completely new school, and didn’t even achieve full occupancy until the middle of 2004, the football field accommodated no play whatsoever until the 2005 sea- son. That’s an initial fall grow- in period, plus some 16 months of unfettered grow-in/root growth before a game was ever played. You can see where this is going. “We didn’t play on the field until the fall of 2005,” says Pechette, looking back, “and that was a dry fall. It looked great. But the next year we had wet summer and that contin- ued into the early fall of 2006. It didn’t take long before we were clued in to just how bad the drainage was. “It just wasn’t built as it was designed, we learned. The con- tractor had short-cutted the sand depth, for example. The way they graded the field, it settled poorly after a series of rainfalls. A lot of shortcuts were taken which, as far as I’m con- cerned, means the job wasn’t supervised properly. The con- tractor did a lot of road con- struction. Enough said on that.” You can see where this is going. Pechette and Lakes Com- munity High School were obliged to rebuild after just four seasons of play. The $150,000 reconstruction was handled by Lohmann Sports Fields (LSF) out of Marengo, IL. Based on plans by the Ver- non Hills, IL-based engineering firm Gewalt-Hamilton, Lohmann re-crowned the field by installing a tapered sand cap, while adding soil amendments to achieve the proper, drainage- enabling soil profile and a bet- ter growing medium. The perimeter of the field was ag- gressively aerated and top- dressed with the same sand mix, and a 6-inch Multi-Flow drainage system was installed beneath the entire field before A lot of shortcuts were taken which, as far as I’m concerned, means the job wasn’t supervised properly. 32 SportsTurf | July 2011 www.sportsturfonline.com By