Elizabethtown Sports Park Turf and Field Maintenance: December 2013

It has been several months since my last post, we had such a busy season! I do try to keep up somewhat with social media. I can be found on twitter @ESPTurfGuy I occasionally post photos and updates regarding Sports Park maintenance. Since things have slowed down here, our last event ended December 1 and the weather is turned bad, we have had a opportunity to run some numbers from the past season.

For the 2013 season, we hosted roughly 24 baseball/softball tournaments, which were mostly 2-4 day weekend events with a couple 6 day weeklong tournaments. Soccer is a bit different, we hosted roughly18 events on our sports fields, including a lacrosse event and a cross country meet. We also hosted 218 local youth league games (baseball, t-ball, soccer, & football).

The baseball/softball season runs March thru October. We hosted in the range of 3000-3500 games total on our ball diamonds. This averages out to 250-300 games played/field. Soccer season runs March thru November, we averaged around 200 games/events on those fields.

Here are numbers for related materials used for the season:

560 bags or 14 tons of Mound/batters box clay
34 tons of vitrified clay field conditioner
200 bags or 5 tons of calcined clay field conditioner; mainly for field drying
420 bags or 10.5 tons of chalk for line marking

Additionally we used:

230 gallons of field paint
182 cans of aerosol paint
44 tons of sand topdressing material on all fields

For our concessions operations we sold:

24,632 Hot Dogs/Sausages
23,688 Ice Cream
97,066 Total Drinks

41,527 bottles of Gatorade and Water
10,799 cups of Pepsi (top fountain drink seller)

1,358 Pickles
4,833 Snicker Bars
9,432 Boxes of popcorn

Operationally we used an equivalent of 216 miles of toilet paper and generated nearly 4 million pounds of garbage. The Park employed close to 100 seasonal employees on top of the 11 fulltime staff members.

After the heavy field use of this past season, we saw some areas where we needed to address on our ball diamonds. Here are some photos of some infield skin renovations we did in the fall. We widened some running lanes, changed a few position cutouts, sodded some spots, made home plate area larger, added walkways to 2 fields, laser graded 4 infields and add infield mix to a number of basepaths. Just to name a few!