Internship paper final

2011 Summer Internship Report By: Adam Gregersen 1

Introduction This summer for my 2011 internship report, I got the privilege to work at JackTrice Stadium in Ames, Iowa. I was so blessed to get the opportunity to work at JackTrice for a couple reasons. The first reason is it is home to the Iowa State Cyclones,which was awesome, because I bleed cardinal and gold. I’m a football guy, so I knewthere was going to be a lot of times were we were going to be around the football teamor doing things for the football team. That’s not the only sport we did jobs for, but that’sthe one that got me most excited to go to work every day. The second reason wasbecause it was close to home, so I didn’t have to travel a long distance to get to my job.It was definitely a great experience for me especially because I haven’t had anyprevious work dealing with turfgrass. I was really looking forward to doing hands onthings and getting experience working on sports fields. My boss, Tim Van Loo was anawesome guy to work for and the people he hired were fun to work with. 2

Tasks Everyday during the whole summer my starting time was 7:30 a.m. and everyone would meet in theshop. Tim would come prepared with a list of things that needed to be done for that dayand sometimes a bigger list of things that needed to be done for the whole week. Fromthere, he would assign things for us to do and we would go on our way to try to get asmuch done as possible. Usually there was mowing to be done every day. There wasprobably about one day during the week that we didn’t mow. That’s the number onething that I did during this summer’s internship. A lot of people including me, thought allwe had to mow was just the sports fields but that wasn’t the case at all. There was a lotmore mowing that needed to be done than just the fields. We were responsible for 3

about all of the area by the baseball and softball field (southwest) including the trackarea, most of the cross country area, the area that surrounds the entire fields, all of thehillsides inside Jack Trice, and finally, half of the area around the Jacobson Building andalong the Bergstrom Building. How much it rained or how long Tim had the irrigationgoing usually determined the amount of mowing we did. Monday, Wednesday, andFriday during the summer was usually when we mowed the fields. It was almost aguarantee that we would have to mow these fields three days a week. On Tuesday’s wewould mow the islands out in the parkinglots and around the Jacobson andBergstrom building. We always wouldsend someone out to mow southwestand cross country because that wasusually an all day job or close to it job.The hillsides would be mowed whenneeded. As time went on during the season, the less and less it needed to be mowed.I’d say we mowed it once or twice every two weeks. The second biggest thing we did was aerifying the fields and spraying.Unfortunately, I didn’t get to have the experience with spraying this year, because Iwasn’t certified. We had three people, excluding Tim, who was certified and couldspray. Tim was usually the one who went out and sprayed the fields and the other guyswent around the stadium with backpacks and sprayed. He usually sprayed at least oncea month and maybe two times a month on some fields. The picture at the right showsTim spraying the before we painted it. I know that if I want to seriously do this for the 4

rest of my life I’ll need to take a class to become certified. The other big thing we didwas aerification work. Tim decided this year that we were going to do two times a monthon Jack Trice and the Johnny Majors practice field. Every other field was once a month.This was a job that everyone could do. I mostly did the topdressing, just because I wasusually doing something else when Tim was aerifying. We would sweep up the coresthat were dispersed on the field and unloaded it at the daily farm. We did that so thatthere wasn’t a mess on the field and the cores wouldn’t be run over when we topdressed. We aerificated a lot more this year than the previous year and we could tell thedifference. T field held up a lot better during the games than in previous years. 5

The most important thing we did this summer and during the football season wasget the fields ready for play. This includes painting them. Once football season started,that’s all we did during my time at work. Every Monday we would have to paint thepractice field and get that ready to go. When there was a game during the week, wewould paint “The White” on Wednesday and “The Red and Yellow” on Thursday. Wesplit up the painting so we weren’t rushed on Friday. I got a lot of experience withpainting fields this summer. I actually enjoyed painting because it was a change fromsitting on a mower all day. The logo was probably the most fun to paint. It was likeconnecting the dots. A lot of paint was used during the week when we had to paint thefootball field. We used probably about 50 gallons of 1:1 paint during the week.Obviously, when there were soccer games or cross country meets we would have topaint them as well. That didn’t take as much paint as the football field. Probably three orfour gallons of 1:1 paint mix. As you can see in the picture to the bottom right, the finalproduct on the field looked awesome. It was bright and looked sweet on televisionevery game Iowa State played at home. I think Tim was very pleased with the way itplayed and looked during the season. Nottoo many worn down spots till after it gotclose to the final game. We got a lot of goodcomplements during the game from peoplein the stands and visiting fans for how wellthe field looked. That was always good tohear. 6

There were a lot of other little projects we would do here or there that needed tobe done. One thing was mulching around every bed and trees around Jack TriceStadium. That took several days because nobody wanted to do it. The weather had alot to do with that. It was hot and just took forever, but we got it done and it lookedgood. There were times where we had to move desks, cabinets and other things in theJacobson building. We weren’t just field crew people, we were facilities as well. We hadto do some annoying jobs that didn’t always deal with turf but they weren’t dreadful jobs.We were pretty busy this summer with more than just maintaining fields, but as timewent by and it got to be fall, there wasn’t as much mowing to be done. The majority ofthe jobs turned into painting.What Went Wrong You never want to see anything go wrong when working especially if it’s duringan internship, but things do happen and you learn from them. Unfortunately, the biggestthings that happened that I can remember involved me. There was one team effectmistake that happened this summer. A couple people and I were painting the field forthe Shrine game in July, when we noticed something wrong that we painted. Wepainted a 100 feet of hash marks on one side of the field incorrectly. They weresupposed to go on the inside closest to the logo but we put them facing the numbers. Atleast we had only one side done but I don’t know how none of us caught that mistake. Itwasn’t so much that we were mad, because it was kind a funny, but it was annoying thatwe had to clean it up. We were thinking about just leaving it because it was a highschool game but we thought people would notice, plus it wouldn’t look good. So, we hadto carry buckets of water out from the shop and started scrubbing on our hands and 7

knees. The recent hash marks were easy because the paint was still wet but once wegot down to where we started, it didn’t come off as well. It was a mistake that nobody isgoing to ever forget. That set are day back a little bit because we had to scrub. The second thing that happened over the course of the summer involved memowing the soccer field. I was going along with my business that day when all of asudden the sidewinder wheel fell completely off. I have no idea why it happened but Iwas going to turn around when I had one side of my mower on the ground. I looked likethe threads where the wheel connects was worn down and just slipped off. Even thoughit wasn’t my fault at all, I was mad that it happened just because I was the one mowingwhen it happened. It took awhile for us to get it loaded on a trailer because we had noway of driving it. So that was a frustrating day, but Tim told me to not worry about it andsaid, “It wasn’t your fault.” Other than those two problems there weren’t too many otherthings that happened. Little stuff here and there that people accidently did, but it wasn’tthat big a deal.Interesting Things The interesting thing going on this summer at Jack Trice Stadium was theaddition of the new 7 million dollar scoreboard. It caused a lot of problems though, dueto the fact that we didn’t have a shop for basically the whole summer. We weren’t ableto drive down the ramps to the shop because of all the construction work that was goingon down on the bottom. So we had to move all of our equipment to the south side of thestadium and walk to get it whenever we needed it. It also was a pain when we neededto work on mowers because obviously we had no access to anything to fix it unless we 8

bought it over to the south end.The Jacobson building was evenclosed for two days in order forthem to put up the big beams forthe scoreboard. So we weren’teven allowed to be in the shop fortwo days. It was awesome to seehow they bought the beams inand how they put them up. They had two of the biggest cranes in the United States thatthey brought in to put up the scoreboard. They were nothing that I have seen before.They struggled getting them down the ramps and it took over a lot of the bottom area bythe shop. It was put up during the night time hours so that they wouldn’t have anaudience. We could have come to watch them put it up because we worked there butthey did it so late that it wasn’t worth it. That next day though, I was really lookingforward to seeing it up. Even though it was stressful for us sometimes, Iowa Stateneeded a new scoreboard and it was worth it.Conclusion This summer internship gave me a lot of experience with how to maintain sportsfields. It’s easy to learn about it in the class room but until you go out and actually do the 9

work, you will have a hard time understanding how to do it. It was a great experiencefor me and I enjoyed being around football practice and everything that went on withIowa State sports. My boss is an awesome person to work for and I feel like he can helpme with anything I have to ask or need help with. I plan on coming back again thissummer and looking forward to doing a lot more things that I didn’t get to do this year. Go Cyclones!. 10

Internship paper final

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Internship paper final — Document Transcript