Many communities come together under the lights of a Friday night football field, that iconic location for high school sports in autumn. The football field is a point of pride, serving as a local gathering place, something fans and athletes look forward to each year. With frequent activity on the field throughout the year, football field turf maintenance requires thoughtful planning and a specific skill set.
It’s a big job to get a field ready for fall sports, especially when practice begins as soon as winter frosts end. Attentive ground crews have a lot to accomplish before football field painting begins to maintain practice and playing fields. A comprehensive turf care plan and access to modern painting technology can set your athletic department up for success throughout the life of the field.
Begin by Auditing Field Quality
To get started, look at the field from all angles. From your field’s highest point, you can get a bird’s-eye view of discoloration and wear to treat and repair. Next, carefully walk the field, looking for weeds, pests, and other problems. High-traffic areas like the center of the field may be beaten down – take note of the firmness of the playing surface in different areas. The goal of a well-maintained field is to create an overall uniform playing surface for safe, regulated football.
One key problem to identify early is the field’s drainage. Observe your field turf after rain, looking for standing water and changes in the field’s topography. Attention to detail is key: if you catch small problems before they become big problems, your grounds team can identify the necessary action items to cultivate, nurture, and prepare the game and practice turf for football field painting.
Heal and Nurture the Turf
Good turf care in the spring can make a big difference to game field quality in the fall. As early as possible, SportsTurf Managers Association suggests taking a field soil sample and sending it for testing (local universities can test and report on your soil). With the resulting report, you can optimize your fertilization and mowing schedule and correct soil pH levels if needed.
Spring is the most important time to focus on soil oxygen flow and water infiltration. Aerating the field with hollow tines relieves soil compaction, breaking it up to encourage seed growth. Afterward, topdress the field with your seed of choice and fertilize. In some places, it may be necessary to resod for thicker turf – but this step is best taken in late summer or early fall after spring cultivation has had its chance to work.
The Value of Maintaining Practice Fields
Resting your game day field over the summer can be difficult if the school’s sports teams or marching band use it to practice. The wear and tear isn’t ideal for your field’s maintenance and painting schedule, but is it really worth the effort to take care of practice fields as well? It can feel counterintuitive to spend so much of your ground crew’s time and effort on the game field when the team spends most of their time on the practice fields, but a poorly maintained practice field is a safety risk.
Innovation in aeration, mowing, and seeding technology combined with a few tips can make practice fields manageable for your team:
- Utilize half fields. For drills and scrimmage, most teams only need half fields. If the team needs to practice on the game field, communicate with the coaches to keep the practice off the center of the field, the most highly trafficked area during the season.
- Rotate locations. Practice field locations can rotate between teams and change by a few yards from week to week. This gives the grass a break in routine, contributing to overall field safety.
- Minimize practice field painting. Practice fields do not require the same precision and accuracy demanded for game-day football field painting. Coaches can use minimal lines and cones, keeping practice field painting out of the busy field maintenance schedule.
Ultimately, a practice field helps your game-day field rest and grow while you wait for the first paint of the season.
Spend Less Time on Painting and More on Turf
The hard spring and summer work pays off when it’s time to paint your game-day field for the season. Painting the football field for the first time can take a grounds crew up to two days: staking and laying out the field, painting hash marks, stenciling numbers, and adding details. Often the lines must be painted over twice for clarity and visibility – and keeping those lines clean can mean weekly repainting to avoid losing sight of them.
Painting a field is a specialized skill, and not all ground crew members will have the experience to do it. If that skill is provided by coaches or volunteers caring for the field around their other duties, the look and feel of your high school football field can suffer. And after all the hard work on upkeep over the spring and summer months, painting the field for game day shouldn’t risk devaluing that hard work.
Enter the field-painting robot. Instead of spending days squaring and laying out the field with manual tools, your team can spend a minimal amount of time on setup and still make a huge impact. Field painting robots can complete a football field, including hash marks, in 2.5 hours with pinpoint accuracy (within half an inch). Using the connected tablet, you and your team can task the robot with endzone lettering, yard numbers, and other custom designs – or you can give your volunteers more time to do creative work by leaving the precision painting to the machine. Imagine: you could even partner with local businesses to add logo sponsorship to the field, opening up a new potential revenue stream and fundraiser for school athletics.
With a robot doing the most difficult work, calculating the correct distances between lines and painting them clearly and visibly on the first pass, your ground crew has more time to spend on all those other beautification tasks – repairing bleachers, replacing light bulbs, and making field upgrades, for example. And you aren’t leaving a tough job in the hands of inexperienced volunteers; instead, you and your team can make the most of their field maintenance time.
Take Advantage of Technology to Gain Efficiency
“Taking a beautiful turf canvas in pleasant September weather and keeping it safe and playable as the temperatures drop through Thanksgiving takes an artist’s touch,” says Rich Watson, Grounds Supervisor for the Pine Hill, New Jersey, school district. Over the years of organized sports, care for game day fields has advanced in many ways–and it’s time for football field painting to catch up.
Taking advantage of technology like a field line painting robot can turn a good field into a great field, all while reducing strain on your team. Caring for your game day fields takes time, planning, and effort all year–don’t fumble the ball at the end zone! If you’re ready to explore the efficiency and accuracy a robot like the TinyLineMarker adds to your maintenance process, book a demo now and see the value for yourself.