Turf Wars

Ag Students Seek 4th National Title in Competition on Turf Management

The Turf Terps working together at last year's competition.

Image Credit: Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

January 19, 2016

The golf course and stadium superintendents of the future encircle their foe.

Hands in pockets, baseball caps pulled down low, the eight or nine young men examine the plant in a pot on a classroom table in an otherwise silent Jull Hall. Their job is not to eradicate this weed, with its hairy leaves and yellow blossoms. Today, they must simply identify it.

This is just one component of a three-hour exam—one of four this month alone—that the students in UMD’s Institute of Applied Agriculture (IAA) took to prepare for the Sports Turf Management Association Student Challenge, which will take place Jan. 21 in San Diego. They’ve won the national competition the past three years; no program has ever won four consecutive titles.

A few weeks later, some of them will return to that city for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America’s Collegiate Turf Bowl, where the Terps placed second in 2015 after winning in 2014.

“It’s a blast,” says Scott Hebert, who also competed last year on both teams and is pursuing a certificate in the IAA’s sports turf management program. “It’s about reinforcing what you learn in class, and getting to know your buddies from school and their strengths, and making the trip, and seeing all the new technologies, cultivars and construction equipment.”

Turf is more complicated to manage than any front lawn. It combines business skills (budgeting and staffing), aesthetics and agronomy to ensure that fields are safe, attractive and playable. But the fields, whether collegiate soccer pitches or private golf courses, may have multiple grasses and most certainly must fend off the threats of weeds, pests and diseases.

The two competitions test the knowledge of students entering those fields (literally), requiring teams of four from universities around the country to identify samples of potential troublemakers (including dead bugs under glass), know what pesticides, fungicides or herbicides are needed in different circumstances, describe properties of different soils, understand weather effects, and even build an irrigation system on the fly using a box of PVC pipes, valves and sprinkler heads.

Then there are the factors that players and fans can see, like directional mowing, field marking and logo painting, and pitcher’s mound construction.

The winner at this week’s Student Challenge, which draws about 30 teams, will take home $4,000 for its turf program. The Turf Bowl is even more competitive, with 80 to 90 teams; the top 10 split $10,000 in cash and other prizes.

Longtime IAA lecturer Kevin “Doc” Mathias has been coaching the students for 25 years, since well before the sports-turf contest began. He starts by plucking the most successful students from his turf management course to create two or three teams, then drilling the volunteers with lab practicals, weekly online quizzes and hands-on (or eyeballs-on) practice sessions.

“Really, it started as more of a ‘go and see how you do,’ and then the competitions got more intense,” says Mathias. “If you want to be a top team, you’ve got to put a lot of time into it.”

He’s now assisted by Alex Steinman, University Recreation and Wellness’ field manager, whose job includes overseeing 21 acres of outdoor facilities. As a student, he competed for archrival Penn State in the two competitions, and now he enjoys pumping Terps for details about the blade differences between bermudagrass, Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass—which could be asked on the competition exam.

“I tell a lot of people, it’s like the SAT: Your brain hurts when you’re done,” Steinman says.

Source: terp.umd.edu