Tennessee Turfgrass Association – Member Spotlight on Bill Marbet – Owner of Line to Line, LLC

October 6, 2021 | Tennessee Turfgrass Association | PODCAST

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Tennessee Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com

How did you get involved in this line of work and what was your career path?

Many years ago when my two sons were playing Little League baseball, the dads had to work on the fields, and I owned a tire business here in Columbia. With us dads working on the ball fields, one thing led to another and it became a passion. Other people started to ask us, “Can you come look at our dirt?” or “Can you come look at our mound?”

I had the opportunity to sell my tire business, and I told my wife that we’re going to take a huge leap of faith and chase the passion. In 1996 we started Southern Athletic Fields and grew that until 2018, when we sold SAF to Profile Products. Since then I’ve done a little for them, but now we’ve branched out and started a couple other companies. We have Game Time Sports Fields, it’s renovation, grading, whatever needs to be done on an athletic field, we try to do it. Then Line to Line is accessory based – netting and painting, bases, drags, all the other things that I enjoy doing. We’re trying to reinvent the wheel and come up with new, and maybe sometimes better, ideas on how to maintain baseball and softball fields.

Have you always primarily worked in baseball and softball, or have you ventured into other sports?

We painted and striped football and soccer fields, we’ve done a lot of topdressing and grading of football and soccer fields. So we’re not just baseball and softball, but I think most people know me as “The Dirt Guy,” so that’s kind of where we’ve had our home.

Do you do a lot of turfgrass maintenance, or do you rely on someone else to work with you while you’re doing dirt work?

We have some partners that do most of the turf part of it. We have tried over the years to specialize in the ballfield dirts, mound clays, and the particular types of infield mixes. We’ve been very fortunate from the Little Leagues to high school to colleges to Major League fields to have our particular type of infield mix.

Some people call you the “King of Dirt.” How did you earn that title?

Well, that was not my idea. I think there’s one reason they call me that, no one else ever wanted to be tagged with that label. We’ve always said, it’s not just dirt. There’s a lot more to it. From the beginning when we’d just find something that was kind of red that would work on a ballfield, and we’d begin to understand what made this particular blend work. So we started getting into the differences between sand, silt and clay. We started looking at the different components of dirt and we started looking at the percentages of sand, the percentages of silt, the percentages of clay.

Not all areas are the same, so we got into that and found the proper blend, if you will. We were very fortunate. I’ve driven thousands of miles, and when you see red dirt, you think, “Well, that’s it.” We were fortunate to find an area that it did work and the percentages were there. Early on, that was before people got into what’s called engineered soils, but to have a consistent supply, and that’s what we were looking for long-term, was a consistent infield mix that a school or an organization could get from us and know that from one year to the next that they were dealing with basically the same material. As time has gone on and our customers and our coaches and field managers have understood that there’s different things that go into this besides just going out in the field with a tractor. We’ve learned a lot and we’ve tried to educate our customers to the point now where we can, through our blending process that we have, there’s very few other people that are doing the blending that we have done here when we were Southern Athletic Fields, and we continue to do them now with Line to Line. So year after year after year, we can have exactly the same percentages, we can make sure that the consistency is there for our customers.

What do you think has changed over your career about expectations on sports fields?

The key ingredient in anything that we do is the safety and playability for the athletes. If it’s girls or boys, if they’re five years old or a Major League guy that’s 40 years old, it’s about consistency and making sure that every time, they know they’re going to get a proper bounce on their infield mix.

What has been the biggest challenge of the work you do?

The biggest challenge is probably from a financial side, early on, for people to understand, especially when we first started before 2000, that they could get a big truckload of dirt for $100, and back then we may have been charging $300. The educational process, for not only me and our employees here, but the coaches themselves, for them to understand that there is a difference and you can make the field better and in turn you can make your players better. If they feel safe about the surface that they’re on, obviously their mindset is going to be, “Hey, I can make every play with this because I know what I have here.” So that’s been, I don’t know if I’d say a challenge, but I’d say an education for not only us, but our customers.

How did you get started, 23 years ago, being part of the SEC baseball grounds crew?

We started in 1998, the first time I went down, I had a friend of mine that was the head groundskeeper for the Birmingham Barons, they played in Hoover, Alabama. We went down there and met some other buddies and we’re sitting in the stands and the head groundskeeper and his one assistant were trying to change over the field. This is the first year they had it in Hoover. He had obviously a short timeframe to do a whole lot of work, so we hopped the fence to go over and help him. That kind of kickstarted it.

Then I had another friend that went to the commissioner of the SEC and said, “Why don’t you let this guy take over and get a crew of people down here to take care of this?” So Glen Lucas was at Auburn at the time and later came to work for us at SAF and continues to work for us now. He and I started talking about this and said that’s maybe something that we could do. So we got on the phone and got it in gear.

Currently, it’s quite a production, the SEC Tournament is a big production period. But for us as groundskeepers, we have at least 24, 25 guys on hand every game. That’s a lot of people, I understand that, but one, we have to have that many for tarp duty. We never know that week if it’s going to rain, but we have to be prepared, so that’s why we have the numbers that we do. That allows us to really concentrate on specific duties between games. Typically we’ll have 12 to 15 minutes to turn the field around. We take the chalk up, we drag, we water, we pack the mound, pack the plate, change the logos and fix both bullpens. We do all of that in 12 to 15 minutes. So we have a lot of guys, but we have plenty of things for them to do between games. That’s been a real joy and the staff at the SEC office are great to work with. Those people are tremendously professional, and it’s been a big joy of what we’ve done.

Let’s talk about your time as a part of TTA. You’ve served on the board in the past, and it’s great organization with a lot of sports field managers. Has that been helpful to you as you’ve grown the business and started doing different things, having that network of professionals in the TTA?

When someone says that you’re successful, I guess that’s a relative term. But if I’ve been successful in anything, it’s the relationships that I’ve had with people in the turfgrass industry. From the young guys that, when we go into colleges or high schools and see a young man in a high school that says, “I’d really like to do that.” Well, why don’t you go to one of the SEC schools, for instance, and get a turf degree and go into turf management? We’re fortunate that there’s been several that have become the head turf guys at their schools and they’ve come through what little knowledge that I may have had, that at least it inspired them to make this a career. So that’s been tremendously gratifying, the relationships, and that’s something that’s missed tremendously now with technology that you get away from the relationships and the one-on-ones. If there’s anything that I think I may have done halfway right, it’s that I cherish, tremendously, the relationships that I’ve been able to have in this profession.

How would you advise young people, either just coming into the athletic field or sports turf industry, or who are considering that as a career path?

The biggest thing to me is that most of the time you can see immediate results, and if you work hard and you understand and you have a passion for what you do, you’re going to see those results and you’re going to get the “Wow Factor.” To have that ability to do something like that is very special and the average person, the average fan says, “I know if that’s real grass, that can’t be easy,” or “How does that dirt play like that in their infield mix, it’s not all choppy.” It’s understanding that you did that, that was part of your efforts. It’s very self-satisfying. Sometimes the money’s not exactly what everybody thinks, but I think our world of groundskeeping and turf professionals is getting better and I don’t think it’s going away.