Sports

Benedictine Sport Fields Open Spring Season as Award Winners

The university's baseball and softball fields each won a national "Field of the Year" award in December.

This week baseball team played its first home game of the season at the Village of Lisle-Benedictine University Sports Complex against North Park University after a spring break spent on the sun-soaked Bermuda-grass fields of Winter Haven and Auburndale, Fla.

By game time, fields superintendant Kari Allen and her crew of four part-time student workers had repaired the mounds and plate, dragged the field and watered it down. Baselines are chalked and basepaths are raked.

“I know there’s more to it than this,” Allen said, trying to list off her team’s daily duties. “That’s just the basics, I guess.”

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It might be surprising, especially considering Allen’s modesty, that the Benedictine field that has to withstand the brutal Chicagoland winter conditions—as well as still-pretty-brutal early spring conditions (40 degree weather and overcast conditions dominated Tuesday’s game)—was the 2010 “Field of the Year” for college baseball, according to the Sports Turf Managers Asssociation (STMA).

The Benedictine complex’s softball field also took home its respective award. Both were given in December.  

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The STMA is a national organization of sports-turf professionals whose mission, according to its website, is, “To be the recognized leader in strengthening the sports turf industry and enhancing members’ competence and acknowledgement of their professionalism.”

Each year a panel of six STMA judges selects the fields of the year for football, soccer, baseball, softball, and sporting grounds for three divisions: professional, college and university, and schools and parks. Recent winners in the college baseball category, according to STMA sales and marketing manager Patrick Allen (no relation to Kari), were big-name Division I fields: Russ Chandler Stadium at Georgia Tech in 2008 and Hawks Field at Haymarket Park, University of Nebraska in 2007. No field was picked in 2009.

Patrick Allen said in an email, “It is somewhat common for there not to be an award presented in a category if the judges feel that none of the applicants are deserving of the award.”

The powers that be at each field considered must apply for the award and winners are picked, according to the STMA, based on “the playability and appearance of the playing surfaces, innovative solutions employed, effective use of budget, and the development and implementation of a comprehensive, sound agronomic program.” The STMA does not release the number of applicants who participate each year.

Stetson University won the last two softball awards in 2008 and 2009. Martin Kaufman, who is the director of grounds at the Ensworth School in Nashville and chaired the STMA panel of judges in 2010, said it came down to Stetson and Benedictine in 2010 for softball. Kaufman said for both softball and baseball, it was those tough conditions at the small Lisle campus that won over judges.   

“It isn’t whose got the most resources and the prettiest field, it’s who did the most with the conditions and environment that they have,” Kaufman said. “If you took the overall account, challenges, resources, structure, where the controls are and are not, the sports field manager [at Benedictine] did the best of anyone in that category with the challenges they had and the resources they had to work with.”

The Benedictine baseball season ends in mid-May, but Kari Allen said the complex is in use for baseball and softball until mid-October. She said in addition to college teams, adult, high school, and youth teams take the field.

According to Benedictine grounds manager Peter Charcut, 50 games will be played at the complex in the month of June.

“There are days when we might have a baseball doubleheader, a softball doubleheader, and a track meet all at once,” Allen said. “So we’ve got to be juggling everything.”

Allen said a lot of the in-season work is to keep the fields aesthetically pleasing. But to keep the field pretty, she said, a lot of work goes into the offseason that people aren’t aware of. Autumn, before the field goes under the cover of a tarp for winter, is crucial, according to Allen.    

“We get the fields as perfect as we possibly can in the fall because you never know what kind of weather you’re going to have or how much time you’re going to have out on the field come spring,” she said. “So we’ll get the mounds perfect, the edging perfect, any sod work we have to do.”

Allen, a Grand Rapids, Mich., native and Michigan State grad who studied turf grass management, worked for the West Michigan White Caps and the Peoria Chiefs minor-league baseball teams before heading the grounds crew of the Triple-A Buffalo Bison for three years. She moved to the Chicago area after her husband got a job with the Chicago Southland Convention & Visitors Bureau. She’s been at Benedictine for three years.

“Kari’s the best in her business,” said Charcut, a 35-year horticulture veteran.

While Allen said she usually hears the occasional negative feedback from field-users, Benedictine head baseball coach John Ostrowski said the field his team plays on is the gem of the complex.

“Everybody just looks forward to playing here at Benedictine,” Ostrowski said. “That field makes everything we do just special.”

Allen’s crew has one mower, one utility vehicle, and one infield groomer. Along with the sturdier Kentucky Bluegrass, the Benedictine field get filled in with perennial ryegrass, a quick-recovery, “bunch-type” grass, according to Allen. When asked about the “innovative strategies” employed, she said she over-seeds in advance spots likely to get torn up and uses a calcined-clay conditioner to soak up wet spots on the field and a vitrified-clay conditioner occasionally this summer when it gets hot and dry.

Allen’s budget can’t afford liquid fertilizer—she does have granular—and it can’t afford the man-hours for postgame maintenance. She’s not supposed to go over 60 total hours per week for her four student workers.    

“I’ve got friends at Division I schools who have five full time guys just on sports fields plus part-time, seasonal people,” she said.

Allen comes off as modest. She noted that the STMA award does not mean she has the best baseball and softball fields in the country. She said she was “definitely surprised” about the honor.  

But when you hear Allen give the reasons she thought her fields were selected, the awards seem like those that any groundskeeper with the right attitude and work ethic can win.  

“Just the wear on the field, the action and the high use, and trying to juggle our time and get the maintenance done,” Allen said. “Just paying attention to little details that other people aren’t going to think of—it makes a big difference in the long run.”


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