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2011 Summer Internship Report

By: Adam Gregersen

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Introduction

This summer for my 2011 internship report, I got the privilege to work at Jack

Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa. I was so blessed to get the opportunity to work at Jack

Trice for a couple reasons. The first reason is it is home to the Iowa State Cyclones,

which was awesome, because I bleed cardinal and gold. I’m a football guy, so I knew

there was going to be a lot of times were we were going to be around the football team

or doing things for the football team. That’s not the only sport we did jobs for, but that’s

the one that got me most excited to go to work every day. The second reason was

because it was close to home, so I didn’t have to travel a long distance to get to my job.

It was definitely a great experience for me especially because I haven’t had any

previous work dealing with turfgrass. I was really looking forward to doing hands on

things and getting experience working on sports fields. My boss, Tim Van Loo was an

awesome guy to work for and the people he hired were fun to work with.

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Tasks

Everyday during the whole

summer my starting time was 7:30

a.m. and everyone would meet in the

shop. Tim would come prepared with a list of things that needed to be done for that day

and sometimes a bigger list of things that needed to be done for the whole week. From

there, he would assign things for us to do and we would go on our way to try to get as

much done as possible. Usually there was mowing to be done every day. There was

probably about one day during the week that we didn’t mow. That’s the number one

thing that I did during this summer’s internship. A lot of people including me, thought all

we had to mow was just the sports fields but that wasn’t the case at all. There was a lot

more mowing that needed to be done than just the fields. We were responsible for

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about all of the area by the baseball and softball field (southwest) including the track

area, most of the cross country area, the area that surrounds the entire fields, all of the

hillsides inside Jack Trice, and finally, half of the area around the Jacobson Building and

along the Bergstrom Building. How much it rained or how long Tim had the irrigation

going usually determined the amount of mowing we did. Monday, Wednesday, and

Friday during the summer was usually when we mowed the fields. It was almost a

guarantee that we would have to mow these fields three days a week. On Tuesday’s we

would mow the islands out in the parking

lots and around the Jacobson and

Bergstrom building. We always would

send someone out to mow southwest

and cross country because that was

usually an all day job or close to it job.

The hillsides would be mowed when

needed. As time went on during the season, the less and less it needed to be mowed.

I’d say we mowed it once or twice every two weeks.

The second biggest thing we did was aerifying the fields and spraying.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to have the experience with spraying this year, because I

wasn’t certified. We had three people, excluding Tim, who was certified and could

spray. Tim was usually the one who went out and sprayed the fields and the other guys

went around the stadium with backpacks and sprayed. He usually sprayed at least once

a month and maybe two times a month on some fields. The picture at the right shows

Tim spraying the before we painted it. I know that if I want to seriously do this for the

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rest of my life I’ll need to take a class to become certified. The other big thing we did

was aerification work. Tim decided this year that we were going to do two times a month

on Jack Trice and the Johnny Majors practice field. Every other field was once a month.

This was a job that everyone could do. I mostly did the topdressing, just because I was

usually doing something else when Tim was aerifying. We would sweep up the cores

that were dispersed on the field and unloaded it at the daily farm. We did that so that

there wasn’t a mess on the field and the cores wouldn’t be run over when we top

dressed. We aerificated a lot more this year than the previous year and we could tell the

difference. T field held up a lot better during the games than in previous years.

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The most important thing we did this summer and during the football season was

get the fields ready for play. This includes painting them. Once football season started,

that’s all we did during my time at work. Every Monday we would have to paint the

practice field and get that ready to go. When there was a game during the week, we

would paint “The White” on Wednesday and “The Red and Yellow” on Thursday. We

split up the painting so we weren’t rushed on Friday. I got a lot of experience with

painting fields this summer. I actually enjoyed painting because it was a change from

sitting on a mower all day. The logo was probably the most fun to paint. It was like

connecting the dots. A lot of paint was used during the week when we had to paint the

football field. We used probably about 50 gallons of 1:1 paint during the week.

Obviously, when there were soccer games or cross country meets we would have to

paint them as well. That didn’t take as much paint as the football field. Probably three or

four gallons of 1:1 paint mix. As you can see in the picture to the bottom right, the final

product on the field looked awesome. It was bright and looked sweet on television

every game Iowa State played at home. I think Tim was very pleased with the way it

played and looked during the season. Not

too many worn down spots till after it got

close to the final game. We got a lot of good

complements during the game from people

in the stands and visiting fans for how well

the field looked. That was always good to

hear.

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There were a lot of other little projects we would do here or there that needed to

be done. One thing was mulching around every bed and trees around Jack Trice

Stadium. That took several days because nobody wanted to do it. The weather had a

lot to do with that. It was hot and just took forever, but we got it done and it looked

good. There were times where we had to move desks, cabinets and other things in the

Jacobson building. We weren’t just field crew people, we were facilities as well. We had

to do some annoying jobs that didn’t always deal with turf but they weren’t dreadful jobs.

We were pretty busy this summer with more than just maintaining fields, but as time

went by and it got to be fall, there wasn’t as much mowing to be done. The majority of

the jobs turned into painting.

What Went Wrong

You never want to see anything go wrong when working especially if it’s during

an internship, but things do happen and you learn from them. Unfortunately, the biggest

things that happened that I can remember involved me. There was one team effect

mistake that happened this summer. A couple people and I were painting the field for

the Shrine game in July, when we noticed something wrong that we painted. We

painted a 100 feet of hash marks on one side of the field incorrectly. They were

supposed to go on the inside closest to the logo but we put them facing the numbers. At

least we had only one side done but I don’t know how none of us caught that mistake. It

wasn’t so much that we were mad, because it was kind a funny, but it was annoying that

we had to clean it up. We were thinking about just leaving it because it was a high

school game but we thought people would notice, plus it wouldn’t look good. So, we had

to carry buckets of water out from the shop and started scrubbing on our hands and

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knees. The recent hash marks were easy because the paint was still wet but once we

got down to where we started, it didn’t come off as well. It was a mistake that nobody is

going to ever forget. That set are day back a little bit because we had to scrub.

The second thing that happened over the course of the summer involved me

mowing the soccer field. I was going along with my business that day when all of a

sudden the sidewinder wheel fell completely off. I have no idea why it happened but I

was going to turn around when I had one side of my mower on the ground. I looked like

the threads where the wheel connects was worn down and just slipped off. Even though

it wasn’t my fault at all, I was mad that it happened just because I was the one mowing

when it happened. It took awhile for us to get it loaded on a trailer because we had no

way of driving it. So that was a frustrating day, but Tim told me to not worry about it and

said, “It wasn’t your fault.” Other than those two problems there weren’t too many other

things that happened. Little stuff here and there that people accidently did, but it wasn’t

that big a deal.

Interesting Things

The interesting thing going on this summer at Jack Trice Stadium was the

addition of the new 7 million dollar scoreboard. It caused a lot of problems though, due

to the fact that we didn’t have a shop for basically the whole summer. We weren’t able

to drive down the ramps to the shop because of all the construction work that was going

on down on the bottom. So we had to move all of our equipment to the south side of the

stadium and walk to get it whenever we needed it. It also was a pain when we needed

to work on mowers because obviously we had no access to anything to fix it unless we

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bought it over to the south end.

The Jacobson building was even

closed for two days in order for

them to put up the big beams for

the scoreboard. So we weren’t

even allowed to be in the shop for

two days. It was awesome to see

how they bought the beams in

and how they put them up. They had two of the biggest cranes in the United States that

they brought in to put up the scoreboard. They were nothing that I have seen before.

They struggled getting them down the ramps and it took over a lot of the bottom area by

the shop. It was put up during the night time hours so that they wouldn’t have an

audience. We could have come to watch them put it up because we worked there but

they did it so late that it wasn’t worth it. That next day though, I was really looking

forward to seeing it up. Even though it was stressful for us sometimes, Iowa State

needed a new scoreboard and it was worth it.

Conclusion

This summer internship gave me a lot of experience with how to maintain sports

fields. It’s easy to learn about it in the class room but until you go out and actually do the

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work, you will have a hard time understanding how to do it. It was a great experience

for me and I enjoyed being around football practice and everything that went on with

Iowa State sports. My boss is an awesome person to work for and I feel like he can help

me with anything I have to ask or need help with. I plan on coming back again this

summer and looking forward to doing a lot more things that I didn’t get to do this year.

Go Cyclones!

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