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/43432
FieldScience | Kevin Mercer >> WHEN CATTAILS GROW in water they take up mass amounts of nitrogen in the water. Here cattails are being planted in drainage areas of an athletic field. >> Top Left: A BLUE HARING perch on tree that fell in the pond makes up part of our buffer zone. >> Middle Left: ST. MARY'S of Maryland helps teach high school athletic directors and coaches cor- rect ways to fertilizer their fields for grow in or regular maintenance. >> Bottom Left: TEACHING COACHES how to mow sports turf- grass without causing injury to plants and avoiding weed encroach- ment and disease pressure. OUTREACH & EDUCATION This should be the most im- SUSTAINABILITY: it is not a small world after all Sports Turf Managers Associa- tion (STMA) is more than 20 years old but we are still a fairly young national organization, al- though we have strengthened considerably under the leader- ship of president Troy Smith, CSFM and past presidents, edu- cators, sports turf managers and CEO Kim Heck, along with her dedicated hard working staff who gave this organization its professional glow. Valuable data can be gained S from sports turf athletics fields, acreage and water sources and I would recommend the STMA try to inventory sports turf man- ager athletic fields/acreage/water sources, etc for important data that they can use for educational and lobbying aspects. On a national scale, there are a lot of properties sports turf mangers care for and in fact, we are often overlooked as profes- sionals because the general public associates or compares our trade with golf course superintendents. PORTS TURF MAN- AGERS are not as few in numbers as you might think. The We all know it is two different worlds, but what have we done to highlight our properties, oper- ational expenditures, investments and to protect our environment? We are all doing our part to stim- ulate the economy, promote safety on the field, and promote environmental awareness. Let's look at comparisons between golf courses and sports turfs from this recently documented survey. Sports turf is growing consis- tently at a rate higher than golf courses, but let's look at the big- ger picture. An 18-hole golf course averages 30,000 people a year and a sports turf profes- sional football game can average 50,000 people per day/per game. That's a lot of folks for outreach and education; now imagine the amount of storm water that could be filtered and retained for irrigation. Look at the acreage as a class- room through signage for mil- lions of children and adults. Let's imagine we could preserve 5% for wildlife habitat from the total of 2,800,000 of sports turf and convert it into 140,000 acres of wildlife. That would equal a 16 SportsTurf | October 2011 $455,000 fuel savings and con- sider the equipment hours and labor savings. Now, let's look at the ground work. portant step a sports turf manager takes in their strategic environ- mental plan for their property. Educating the general public in your environmental maintenance plan does not only highlight your company images, but it also serves as a tool for the public to under- stand how and what we are doing to protect our environment. • Composting for difficult soils • Wildlife Habitats/ Biological control The amount of athletic fields/sports turf is difficult to estimate due to there is no accurate records kept for acreage. However we can break it into the following categories of K-12, colleges, univer- sities, and professional fields according to the Turf Industry /Fact Sheet Sports Turf Advantage Division of Plant Sciences-Turfgrass Research Center College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Re- sources University of Missouri. There is a total of 2.8 million acres of sports turfgrass fields nationally and broken into four groups: Type of Facilities Park & Recreation College & Universities K-12 Professional Sports Total number of Facilities 13,000 2,200 16,000 800 Total National Average of sports turf acreage = 2,800,000 According to the National Golf Foundation, the leading golf courses in the United States are broken down into five different categories: Type of Facilities Total number of Facilities Public 7,958 Resort Private 995 Semi Private 4,256 3,541 Military 197 Total National Average of golf course acreage = 2,542,050 www.sportsturfonline.com By