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/54529
ide scrubber, an oxygen producer, and last, but not least, a venue for entertainment. That being said, there are things that we as an industry can do to become even better stewards of the environment, and hopefully begin to change public sentiment about what we do. Start by fol- lowing BMPs for water management. Also, consider reducing the input to common areas and some fields that may not be your high- est profile sites. Install basic controls that stop irrigation due to rain. This last one should be a no brainer at this point, but recently I witnessed an athletic site being irrigated in the rain. Ouch. Con- sider stepping up to a central control type system that can both help you water most efficiently and also closely monitor usage. Another idea is to incorporate plant growth regulators (PGRs), specifically trinexapac-ethyl, into your maintenance program. The use of PGRs is widespread in the golf community; however, there has been more hesitancy to embrace this family of chemicals in the sports turf world. This is certainly understandable as wear patterns in golf and sports are vastly different. Further complicate this with tiny grow-in windows (specifically from overseeding stress/damage) and the idea to use something that "slows" the plant down is coun- terintuitive. The reality is that trinexapac-ethyl reduces the plants' vertical growth and elongation while promoting turf density and turf qual- ity by stimulating growth of other plant parts such as stolons, rhi- zomes, tillers and roots. These deeper roots and denser turf can reduce water usage by up to 25%. A growing trend among colleges and some school sites is to build water retention sites that collect water from a variety of sources in- cluding air conditioning condensate. Last summer at Georgia Tech we installed a third such system on our athletic properties. The campus has also installed several cistern systems and plans to ex- pand the use and installation of them as part of the Institute's larger initiative to strive for LEED certification on all new construction. The concept is quite simple in that a site collects water in anything from tanks to ponds and then uses a pump to irrigate with the col- lected water. The system installed at Georgia Tech's practice field in the sum- mer of 2011 is 280,000 gallons and collects water from the 93,000- square foot roof of the Brock indoor practice facility, the 75,000-square foot natural grass practice field adjacent to the build- ing, and the surrounding hardscape (see photo). Interestingly, the cistern at this site is also tied to a campus cistern that collects con- densate water from the Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building. Due to this cistern's central location, it is able to provide irrigation water for the track, practice football, and baseball fields. The other two cistern systems are located at Grant Field (stadium football) and the Shirley Clements Mewborn softball field. Although the water retention concept is quite simple, the reality is a bit more complex. If your facility is looking at installing a cis- tern system, be prepared to do some homework and provide some data about your specific needs to the system designers. Some obsta- cles to potentially overcome is how to provide water for small vol- umes from either a garden hose or small ornamental spray zone all the way up to a multiple rotor zone with heads capable of irrigating at 25gpm+ each. www.stma.org SportsTurf 29 Also, prepare for the inevitable—running out of water and/or system failure—in which case you will want a readily available back up water source. Be aware that any weakness in your current system may be quickly exposed when dealing with fluctuations with pump driven water if previously on a city source. Do not forget to alert your user groups to the change over from city water to city cistern water, which should be generally good public relations. Obviously, there are multiple benefits from a cistern system, but it will not be without expense and some of your time as well. They do bear some monitoring compared to a city supply. This is espe- cially true as you are learning/debugging the system, but eventually this will level out. In the long run it is likely that your initial instal- lation expense and maintenance expenses will be offset by the sav- ings in city water. CARBON FOOTPRINT If water usage is a hot topic in the world of sustainability, then fuel usage and carbon footprint is certainly a close second. There is only a limited amount we as sports turf managers can do about this until more advanced technology is available. In the meantime, we can make sure our equipment is properly maintained and running efficiently. Once again, consider the use of PGRs. As mentioned above, the water savings from improved rooting and density could be enough to encourage the use of a PGR, but what PGRs are really most known for is their ability to reduce mowing. There is the po-