F.O.Y. Field of the Year Grow-in results
in Field of the Year Award for North Scott Community
>> 9/4/09: Pre-game warm-ups, 135 days after seeding N ❯
ORTH SCOTT COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT, EL- DRIDGE, IA, won the STMA 2010 Football Field of the Year in the School/Parks category, led by John Netwal, CGCS, a leader and influ- ential turf manager in the region. Director of Operations Netwal was a superintendent for 20 years before taking of the sports turf management for the school district before being named to his current post. He
and what he calls the District’s “unsung heroes,” his 3-man maintenance team, Andy Hamman, Terry Loesel and Chris Thomas, cover 110 acres of general grounds and 11 acres of sports fields.
The football field needed renovated because an open ditch between track and field was getting worse and so was the drainage. The 50-year-old playing surface was stripped to a
depth of 11 inches to establish a new base pad for rebuilding the field; the pad was laser-leveled and new irrigation and drainage systems were installed. The entire playing surface was capped with 4 inches of 85-15 mixture of USGA sand and Dakota peat, and laser-graded. Then the surface was lowered about 6 inches to provide for a smoother transition from track to turf.
5/18/09: 24 days after seed- ing
❯ 44 SportsTurf | July 2011
5/26/09: Turf density after first mowing
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6/8/09: 46 days after seed- ing
GROW-IN BEGAN SPRING 2009 “The original project schedule gave us 145-day window to grow in. With weather delays we lost 10 days, which I didn’t think we could afford,” Netwal wrote in his entry. “We finally seeded the field April 24 and began the grow-in by irrigating the field with 3-minute sets on the hour throughout the day. Within 12 days of this light, fre- quent irrigation the field began to germi- nate; then we started to pump nutrients into the field. “In May we applied fertilizer weekly (total lbs: 5.07 N, 3.49 P, 4.32 K/1,000 sq ft) in just the first month. May 26, 32 days
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