By the time most families are getting into the swing of summer sports, you and your team are already anticipating the turf maintenance required for fall field prep, not to mention painting field lines for new sports.
Preparing your fields for fall sports requires a lot of work. Using a line painter can lift the burden of field painting and give you more bandwidth to prepare.
The fall baseball schedule doesn’t care that your baseball fields are well-worn and bone dry. Your hardened soccer fields won’t become safe football fields on their own.
The summer sports season is how most people are exposed to parks and recreation. It’s exciting, and it’s exhausting. Your reward is a long list of chores to handle with an exhausted staff, less seasonal help, and shorter days. You have to make the most of every minute.
But, if you take the right approach, prep your fields, and invest in a little technology, you can have better fields with less manual time and effort.
Fall Turf Maintenance Tips
If you put the right care into your fields between sports, your turf will bounce back stronger each season. Supporting healthy root growth is key, and the best way to do that is by balancing nutrient levels and fostering healthy growth conditions. Ken Mrock, long-time groundskeeper for the Chicago Bears, says that it all starts by benchmarking your turf health with a soil analysis.
Get a Soil Analysis
After a few months of nonstop youth sports, improvisational footpaths, and nervous parents walking dead spots into the sidelines, your turf is sure to be lacking in nutrients. But it’s not always easy to spot them with the eye test.
A soil analysis is typically affordable and quickly performed by a local agricultural college or state extension service. It can reveal PH levels, nutrient deficiencies, and even opportunities for improving your soil health.
Apply Fertilizer and Nitrogen
Think of fertilization as a healthy and nutritious diet for your turf. If your turf gets all the nutrients it needs, it is more likely to resist pets, fight environmental stress, and thrive. But with too much of this or too little of that, your turf can suffer.
Based on your soil analysis and the types of grass seed you use, make sure your turn gets the nutrients it needs according to season. These nutrients are especially important for survival in cold winter months and for easier field prep in the spring.
Aerate Compacted Soil
Soil compaction is the number one enemy for anyone charged with caring for sports fields. It’s the most common cause of weak turns on athletic fields. The more athletes run around a field, the tighter the soil is compacted, leaving less room for roots to grow and flourish.
There isn’t much you can do to prevent soil compaction on sports fields other than not playing sports. But aeration is the best way to improve root growth, and it’s chemical-free.
Aerating your fields between seasons (and even during short breaks in play) gives your grass a chance to grow deep, absorb nutrients, and resist the weekly wear and tear of a sports season.
Topdress Your Soil
Even in places where the soil is mostly healthy, topdressing with sand and topsoil helps improve soil quality, strengthen the seedbed, and literally level the playing field.
Topdressing with sand can improve drainage and address compacted soil while topdressing with soil or fertilizer can add nutrients.
Overseed with Seasonal Grass
Once you’ve fertilized and aerated your soil, you may notice some places where the turf has thinned. It’s common practice for parks departments to overseed between seasons to help keep a thick, lush turf.
It’s important to perform this step after soil maintenance so that the seeds have the best chance of growing. Seeds spread in aeration shoots can also grow deeper before being exposed to foot traffic.
Overseeding at lighter rates over a number of weeks established a cycle of constant germination so that new seeds could replace turf damaged by foot traffic.
Repair the Playing Surface
Even after taking care of your fields, you’ll need to fill puddles with dirt and topsoil, replace divots with healthy turf, and remove thatch buildup,
Streamline Field Painting with a Line Painter
How many workers do you have in the fall compared with the summer? If you’re like most parks and recreation directors, you lose a lot of manpower in August. In fact, 97 percent of parks and recreation departments hired summer staff last year.
TinyMobileRobots give your team the ability to repaint fields in minutes, not days. Plan all of your fields at once from a tablet, run the painter automatically, with multiple robots painting multiple fields at once, and rotate fields to give overused turf a rest. You can even move a field a few yards without hours of backbreaking work.
A single soccer field takes two people two hours to complete; a line painter can finish the job in 20 minutes.
A standard football field can require 10 times as many man hours, while a line painter can finish the job in two hours and 30 minutes. Plus, line painters can stripe multiple fields, one after the other, without stopping.
The TinyMobileRobots technology was designed for anyone to use, so you can focus your most skilled staff on the higher-level turf maintenance tasks, like balancing Ph levels. All you have to do is drag and drop the correct field template onto the correct location using your tablet’s GPS map. You can even plan multiple fields at once. The robot and GPS technology will take care of the rest.
TinyMobileRobots aren’t limited to grass playing surfaces. These robots are capable of painting tennis courts, pickleball courts, track and field lines, and more. They come with more than 200 pre-designed athletic field templates.
Improve and Rotate Playing Surfaces
After a hot, busy summer, you probably have some fields you wish you could rest—or even move a few feet one way or another—but also don’t have the manpower.
TinyMobileRobots can help you refocus your manpower on turf maintenance and care for your fields and soil.
With a Tiny Mobile Robots field painter, you can rotate your playing surfaces by creating new fields in a matter of minutes. This gives you the ability to relieve high-traffic spots by making in-season adjustments.
Even if you don’t have the space to create an entirely new field, you can use TinyMobileRobots to rotate fields. Give damaged spots a chance to recover with almost no time and effort using an automated line painter.
Maybe your main U17 soccer field has hard center circles and goal boxes. A line painter can adjust the field layout so that the worn areas of the field are now in low-traffic spots.
See How TinyMobileRobots Can Help You Prep for Fall with a Line Painter
The team at Tiny Mobile Robots would be happy to answer questions you have about the products. We will even bring line painters to your fields and show you how well one could work for you.
TinyMobileRobots demos are totally non-binding, free, and a little bit fun.
Book a call or demo with TinyMobileRobots.