Billy Turf: Frosty Field Day

       As I sat on my couch, after using up all the hot water in my house, trying to warm up from our field day Wednesday, for some reason, all that stuck in my head was Leslie Chow from, "The Hangover II."He had been locked in an ice machine and after being pulled out just kept saying
"Chow so cold, Chow so cold...". The planned set up didn't start off with excitement,with temps in the mid-twenty's at 7:00AM! We did catch a break for few hours of sun, but the cold rain starting during lunch and hit pretty hard during break down making it tough for our group.
       The interesting part of what could only be defined as raw weather, was it probably helped to make attendance at our field day so good. Anyone you talked to on the Sports Field Management side will tell you they are struggling to get fields open for play. From totally saturated conditions to frozen ground, getting fields open is an very big challenge. If the weather had been better, guys would have been at their own facilities trying to work on the fields.
Our program started with a heavy frost that caused us to change the schedule. Luckily we had the synthetic field maintenance talk with Chuck Hicks from Redexim ready to go. About mid-morning the sun started to peak out and we were able to break into our product stations. After about an hour and a half of product presentations, we were focused on the important part....Jim's Steaks!

     Our hosts at Episcopal Academy, CJ Lauer, Assistant Director of Facilities and Joe Beyer, Director of Grounds, were an unbelievably gracious and a huge help!
I also can't thank enough all of our vendors, who came in to support our field day.
The great  part was the feedback from customers and vendors was all very positive, even with the tough weather conditions.