www.stma.org January 2016 | SportsTurf 35
100% Dura Edge professional. This should really make us more
consistent with moisture and improve the corkboard effect we
are trying to achieve. During our renovation we removed all of
our mounds (including bullpens) and rebuilt them with the new
Turface Professional red mound and home plate clay. We hope
this new clay will cut down on repair time and clay prep.
I think we have tried to get too fancy in the past. The biggest
thing with baseball is consistency and we were not accomplish-
ing that. We tried multiple gumbo clays and I don't think their
upside is worth the extra prep time to make them usable. At the
college level it is hard to spend 2-3 hours a week making clay,
especially with softball, track and spring football practice all
going on at once.
As far as appearance we decided to really simplify things
and become even more traditional. We changed our infield
cutouts to mimic the candy cane look of Busch Stadium in St.
Louis. We have also removed our home plate walk-ups. Due to
the smaller size of our crew we are going to keep our mowing
patterns very simple this season. By doing this we will be able
to focus more time and energy to mound, edge and infield clay
maintenance. I want Russ Chandler Stadium to set a new stan-
dard in playability at the college level. When a team leaves our
field I want them to know they just played on the best surface
college baseball has to offer.
BEN POLIMER, sports turf manager,
Worcester (MA) Academy
I would like to add a few things to [this] year's maintenance
practices, all budget-dependent of course. I would like to add
more spray applications next year, and use some more foliar
products, humates, and maybe another application of growth
regulator (we have had great success with the regulator). We
also haven't seeded entire fields in a few years, so hopefully can
do that to introduce better cultivars.
We contract out our spraying normally three times a sea-
son. We apply products when the school is out of session; it's
just easier for us to do that based on state law. Adding one
more spray especially with a growth regulator right before the
fall season starts will help us get through the first full month
of fall sports. More and more has been talked about humid
acids and humate products. Depending on budget, we can
Budgets have been lower the past
few years, and have cut out almost
completely our contracted services budget.
— Ben Polimer
