Virginia Tech® home

Ready for Game Day

Loading player for https://video.vt.edu/media/1_oo1bebz7...
Category: campus experience Video duration: Ready for Game Day
Before over 65,000 fans enter Lane Stadium for a home football game, Virginia Tech's crew of athletics groundskeepers spend days mowing and painting Worsham Field to perfection.
We're in Lane Stadium, Worsham Field, and we're getting ready for a home game. For games, it's pretty much, we mow it a couple of times during the week. And then we'll start painting on a good week, as long as there's no rain or anything in the forecasts, we usually start on Wednesday. We'll paint letters and probably lines and a few other things today. We'll put another coat on everything, probably tomorrow, and probably mow it again tomorrow. And Friday, we'll either roll it or mow it again before the game, then play ball. The grass is basically bermuda grass latitude 36, and it's overseeded with perennial rye grass right now to kind of keep it green and kind of keep some grass growing on throughout the fall and winter. Bermuda grass starts growing around the end of April, first of May, and pretty much grow it all through the summer and try to make it basically look like carpet and make it a good quality playing surface for the student athletes. This is my 19th year. Went through the Ag tech program. Did my internship here. Four months after my internship ran out I wanted to work a football season, and see how it was, and next thing you know 19 years is rolled on by. I still have to pinch myself in the mornings when I walk in. We pour in our hearts and souls into it. When your job's kind of done, ready for another game. You got 70,000 people in the stands, and a lot of people watching it on TV. It's like, "Alright, This is still cool." At the end of the day, it's all about for the student athletes to be able to play on a safe ball field.