Virginia Turfgrass Council – Education Spotlight on Atlee High School Turf Management With Marc Moran

October 11, 2021 | Virginia Turfgrass Council | PODCAST

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Virginia Turfgrass Journal – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com

The Turf Zone: Welcome to the Turf Zone. In this episode of Virginia Turfgrass, I’m talking to Marc Moran, CSFM and Agricultural and horticultural instructor at Atlee Hight School. Marc, thank you for joining me.

TTZ: We’re talking because Virginia Turfgrass Council is doing a focus on education programs and you lead the turfgrass course at Atlee Hight School. So let’s just start and talk about what that program looks like and how it got started.

MM: So it’s a two-year turf science course. We’ve been in place as an official program, course-wise since 2001-2002. In 2000-2001, I was part of a multi-teacher department and we were going through some proposed changes in our county, we were moving away from production agriculture and trying to get an idea of where our community wanted us to be. We’re still a strong agricultural county, but our school system was trying to move the focus from production to more of a modern agricultural model, so in that year that was going on we were talking about changes, but we hadn’t really decided on what was going to happen. I had taken on a, I was teaching landscape design construction, landscape contracting and I was looking for some outside projects and also we had gone through a coaching change in our football program. One of our assistants took over for our longtime head coach, who had retired. And one of the responsibilities of our coaching staff at the time was to manage their athletic facilities and that was across all sports. And this particular coach didn’t really have a strong background and he was like, “I need some help.” I have an undergraduate degree in Agriculture Education and also Horticulture, and some previous experience through my work with Southern States, and at home in our farm community. So I kind of tied back to a lot of those things and I said I would try to do my best to help him. Most of my experience through Southern States was with corn, wheat and soybeans, and I said, “We should be able to figure it out.” So we went through that discussion and in the meantime I was looking for more projects for my students to work on and we were focused on land measurement. I wanted to venture into surveying a little bit, teach kids how to use surveying instruments and autolevels and transits and things like that. I kind of created a lesson where we plotted points on our playing surface of the football field. And they didn’t realize it at the time, but the points I had plotted were our athletics logo. So “A” and swords, like you would see at University of Virginia. So this “A” and crossed sabres look. So I’d plotted those points, I had an alum who was really sharp in autoCAD, so I laid it out on paper and then we just did angles and distances and things like that, did a little bit of trig with the kids. When we plotted them, they were just a bunch of flags on the fields, then some of the kids started to realize it was our logo. So once we had the logo laid out we went ahead and outlined it, painted it. So it became our first ever sports turf project was our school logo on the 50-yard line at homecoming. And then we really got into it and the next thing you know, its like, “Can you checkerboard our end zones?” Sure, we can figure out how to do that and we were using backpack sprayers to paint, we had no technology at all, and no knowledge. We just made it up as we went. So then my experience with the sports turf, and I got approached by our boosters and, “We like what you did so far, and can you help out a little bit more?” They never really had an agronomy plan and we basically had our coaches put down whatever a sales person who they worked with over time, you know they trusted them. You know, they should have, they didn’t give them bad advice, but they never had a plan. It was always, they got to this date, we do this… there was no long-term plan of how to build an agronomy type situation. So I kind of drew back on what I had experience with when I was an undergraduate and I worked at Southern States working with customers building plans for their lawns and also for their gardens and just kind of expanded on that. Then my college experience in coursework for greenhouse planting, you were on a calendar and we built things based on water sampling and all this other stuff. So it kind of made sense to me to start building some sort of system that we could use. It was applicable to all the sports. So I kind of took this opportunity with the boosters, they had some funding, they were like, “What can we pay for?” So they gave me a chunk of money with my class to improve a practice field. So we took two practice fields and made them better, we did things to help pull traffic off of them, just creative ideas, kids brainstorming, that kind of thing. So we really had a strong 2000-2001. Our spring season was one of the better spring seasons we’d ever had. So at that time we started having curriculum meetings with the county and they decided that in 01-02, they would like to pull out our agriculture production courses and our business courses and implement a turf science program. So myself and two other teachers in the county sat down with our vocational director and we wrote an initial two-year coursework competency outline. Our CP director applied for special course exemption, so we put in this new course, not yet approved by the State of Virginia, but allowed to be entered into as a special course. It went really well in 01-02, we had strong enrollment. I kind of started a program, I started coaching in 00-01, and I asked my CP director, “How do we set prerequisites for the course, now how to I get kids in there?” And he was like “Just pick who you want.” So I went through all the kids that I taught, and like, “You’re a great student for this, you should try it.” I didn’t look for the smartest kid, I looked for the best workers, the kids that I trusted, kids that I felt like, you have an opportunity, you may not realize it. So I had a spectrum of kids from the kid that was almost the valedictorian to the kid with a 4^th grade math ability, but they all worked really well together because they all had a work ethic. I felt like at the end of the day I could trust them. Because in that  environment, we knew we were going to be working with equipment, we knew we were going to be working with pesticides, we knew we were going to be working with fertilizers. And those kinds of things, you screw up one time and property gets damaged or somebody gets hurt. That’s where we wanted to make sure we really covered all our bases and I wanted to find the right kid. So that’s how it worked, I hand-picked my first group. And they were really, they held a very high standard among themselves and they held a high standard just as a program. They really bought into the program approach and those were my first students. I think I had like 17 in my first group. They really bought into what we did. And we took the same logo from the year before. We redid it, made it better. We started an overseeding program that we never had before to the level that we wanted to. All that just fell into place, so by the time the first year was over, I was approached by the State Department of Education, there was a lot of interest in this. So myself and the other two teachers reframed our curriculum we wrote in the first year to meet the State standard framework. The State adopted the program and since then, it’s been a two-year course sequence. You can take one, you don’t have to take two but if you’re going to do it, you have to take the first year. We did it without any industry support or anything, we just put it together. And it wasn’t until end of our first year I really started to realize I needed some more help. All the knowledge I had was, when I worked at Southern States, we used certain herbicides for corn, certain ones for wheat. I kind of just used the turf-grade equivalent of the same herbicides, that’s how I renovated my first field, I used corn and wheat knowledge. Which, looking back, they’re all grasses in some form or another, so it kind of worked out. But I reached out to some industry folks that were previously servicing the school, with our athletic coaches, and I just said, “Here’s what I’m doing.” So I had a couple of good sales guys that really helped me out, figure out exactly what’s the turf and ornamental version of what I was using. And then once I did that started to really build an extensive soil sampling program where we were getting soil samples twice a year and things like that I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know jack diddly-squat about soil samples other than when we would get them at Southern States, I would read the bottom and it would tell you a recommendation and that’s what I would tell the customer. But I never knew why they were the numbers they were, I never had the opportunity to learn the chemical side of soils. I knew the physical side of soils from classes I was in and also soil science classes I had taken in high school. But I never knew the chemical properties, that was something that a guy who actually had an Ag Education degree from Pennsylvania, he had a soil amendment company… I started talking to him and he came and gave a presentation and I was like, “That makes a lot more sense.” And I’ve never thought about it before. So my personal growth is really, I think where the program gained a lot because of my experience with them. And then I got involved in kind of a weird – I was approached by Mark Roberts (the sports turf manager over at Steward School over in Glen Allen) and Mark and I had worked together at Southern States when I was a sophomore in college and I finished up my summer internship and went back to college, I never heard from him again, didn’t know where he was. Super guy, I was disappointed I lost track of him. I was a college student and I was going to meet somebody new as opportunities came about. He reached out to me out of nowhere and said, “Hey, we’re looking for someone, a school representative for Virginia Sports Turf Managers Association.” They’d just kind of re-formed and reorganized, and Tom Tracy was Executive Secretary for the board. They asked me to come on board from a high school perspective, a school and parks perspective. So I got on board there and I was member of the national STMA. I went to a national conference before I was a member of the state association. That was because my boss here in the school got a sports turf magazine and sent it to me and said, “Here’s something I thought you’d like to show the kids.” It was really interesting, but they had a conference listed for Las Vegas in 2001, and I went to my CT director and said, “I can go to the national teaching conference for Ag, and there’s like one workshop that really fits what I want to do. Or I can go to this one and every single workshop is one that I can use in class.” He said, “Pick the one you want to go to.” So I said I wanted to go to the national STMA conference. So I went and I was there for five days and I went to every workshop I could possibly go to and every one of them pertained to something I could do in class. They had a trade show, I walked around and talked to industry folks that I never would have had access to before. Everybody heard what I was doing and they were like, “Take this…” I walked out of there seed samples and contacts, paint manufacturers, equipment manufacturers… it was stuff that I’d never seen before. I came back recharged and had a lot of ideas and kind of put ideas on paper and talked to the kids – “we need to try this.” And we did and we did what nobody else was doing at the school level. Stuff that was happening at the NFL, stuff that was happening in Major League Baseball, NCAA. But for the high school level, it just wasn’t happening. So we started to do some of those things, so I reached out to get equipment. I reached out to the local Toro dealer, they were like, here you go, anything we can help you with, we’ll help you. And that started us off, and now we’re 20 years later and I can’t believe it. I went to  that first turf conference and I met a lady and I brag on her all the time because she’s really a person that helped me in the very beginning, do things that kids were really excited about. Painting logos, design work, all that kind of stuff – it doesn’t affect the game in any way – it won’t score touchdowns, it won’t get penalties, it adds nothing to the game. But for the fan experience it’s totally different and for the kids working on the field, it’s a lot of pride. I met Abby McNeil when Abby was one of the assistants at the Denver Broncos, at the time she gave a big presentation on how to paint, what their paint program was like at the Denver Broncos at the time, and I just sat there, like eat it up, that’s cool, I can do that. Where do you get that machine? How much does that machine cost? Came back home, talked to my athletic director, said here’s we can do, here’s how much money it’s going to save us if we switch to this system. And I figured out on paper, we pay for this paint machine in one year and when you’re dealing with the schools, it’s gotta make sense financially. I had figured out, between the amount of aerosol cans we were using and the type of paint system we had, I could pay for the paint machine in less than a school year. And I did, because of cost savings, all the other types of painting we were doing. BUT here’s what we can do and it opened up wide they types of things we could do on the field. If you asked me one person who really made it happen for us, I would say Abby. I’ve said it at every presentation I’ve done since 2001. It comes up and she always sends me an email and says, “You don’t have to say that.” But it’s true though. One person took the time to talk to me when nobody else had to. I never have let that escape what we do and I tell the kids – you never know when this is going to make… this game could be important for somebody and it’s not somebody on the field. It could be a parent in the stands who maybe it’s their son, daughter’s last game in the high school experience. But we only have one time to make this impression work. Next time it’s the same situation. So visibly our field looks amazing, it’s a field that was built in 1991, it wasn’t built to a string standard, it was just built according to a specification that somebody got out of a book, it was engineered. So we’re making it work and we have for a long time. So that’s the other thing for the kids – they realize that this isn’t the perfect situation, but we’re going to make the best of it. So it’s one of those things that, how’d it happen? It happened very organically. One person helps you, and you thank them, they tell somebody about what you’re doing and those kids – and I go back to those first 17 kids that I had, everything that we’ve done today rests on their shoulders. They worked hard, they weren’t in it for the glory, but they sure worked hard, we had a great time, we learned a lot, we made some mistakes. They laugh now because I had one paint machine, when they started we had backpack sprayers on electric pump sprayers, they were awful. And now I have six professional sprayers that you would see in a college or NFL situation and they say it’s not fair. You’re right, it’s not fair, BUT. We would have never gotten here without the work you guys have done. If you would have put the types of work we do now versus what we did then, they did it so well in a bad situation, you can’t tell a difference in our good situation. They did it so well, and the best picture I have is from 2003, it was a sunset shot of an end zone and it was nasty, it was just like, it was tough. And they said, “Can we do it again?” And I was like, “No, we’re never going to repeat.” So since we’ve started, we’ve never repeated an end zone design. That was just something we said way back when, we won’t do it. And everybody’s like, “Are you going to black it out again?” I’m like, “Nope, not going to do it again.” It was awful to do, but it looked good when we did it. But we’re not doing it again. It’s just, I keep going back to how we started, even every year when we start the school year off, I go back and – those kids held everybody else to a standard. You were going to get blackballed if you came into class and you were late, and the kids would just root you out. It wasn’t me at all, it was just like, y’all handle it. We’ve got somebody that’s not working hard and basically, they didn’t say “get out,” they were just like, “Get in the boat and row. You have to help.” So we carry that standard. It fluctuated, because kids are kids, but we’ve been fortunate and I really have an admiration for people who get to do it every day at higher levels. To do it to that extent, I try to tell the kids, we’re doing stuff now that the people in the NFL were doing 15, 10 years ago. Because they have resources that we don’t. To do what we do at our level, it’s really cool to see the things that we can crank out. I challenge anybody, you got a group of kids that can paint a football field in 45 minutes, let’s go. Because I’ve got seven that can paint a football field in 45 minutes, they flat out truck it, and it looks good when it’s done. We’ve got manpower, in a given period, you give me 20 kids and I can paint a football field pretty quick, and it’s done right, it’s done the way it’s supposed to be done. We just try to get everybody to work together, that’s the hard part, the details of the work itself is not that hard compared to trying to get 20 people, young adolescents, to work together is the hard part.
 

TTZ: Of all of the high school turfgrass science that I’ve talked to in Virginia and beyond, as far as I know, you’ve got the most, you’ve been the longest running, you were established early, so you have the benefit of hindsight with 20 years of this program, so I know that turfgrass science – the chemistry, the equipment, the grasses themselves through breeding – are changing every year and I know that sometimes in the secondary school situation, you can’t respond as quickly to those changes as maybe others can. Walk me through how you progress in your program with industry changes when you might not necessarily have the resources that others could.

MM: Well, we’re still – the football field you see behind me is 90% Baymont Bermuda, so that was the variety developed in the 60s or 70s to be cold tolerant. It is meant to be to the Blue Ridge and out. So in 1991 when the building was opened, that’s what we’re sprigging. There’s sections of it that are newer varieties. We haven’t gone through a major renovation. The major renovations we’ve done basically are agronomic. So we’re using fertilizers that are coated to make sure that’s more effective. The biggest thing that I’ve done to make sure that we’re current as anybody else out there is with our agronomy plans. We’re on a certified nutrient management system, I went and got certified as a certified nutrient management planner. So I make sure that we are doing everything the right way agronomically, with fertilizers to keep Chesapeake Bay water quality and stuff, that’s a big stickler for us. We’re in an education situation, so everything we have to do needs to be tied around that. So to be able to flip this field every time a new variety comes out, it’s financially irresponsible to the education system that we work in… we’re not a one school county, so we have four schools in our county, so if I was a one-school district where everything was funnelled into one facility, we can swing it a little better. But we make a change, other people want to make changes… it’s tough. We have to make decisions for the students, so we have to be really fiscally responsible for the things that we do. So like, I just made a big technology investment through federal funding and grants and we have a reel sharpener. It’s the best of the best. But that was also five years of discussion, explaining how can we recover this. More importantly, what student impact will it have and who can we reach out to when our students are trained in this, what can they do? It really started when we were finishing our revision of the state curriculum and in that meeting, we had industry professionals that felt it was extremely important for student to know how to work in reel grinding in the maintenance side of equipment. Because there’s a strong need for the industry right now. We are very slow reacting in a lot of ways. I still have a 1991 lawn mower that works really well, so we maintain them. I’ve got tractors from the early 90s, late 80s, but those that are built for long term use. So as long as we’re maintaining them. Changes in technology equipment-wise hasn’t really affected us too much because a lot of that equipment that is on the high end of change, fraze mowing and those types of things, those are $60,000 pieces of equipment and we as a school would only use it once, twice a year, so we’re not going to spend a lot of money for one or two uses per facility. That’s better left to a contractor, one of our big supporters, we have good connections and they work with us. I know who to call if I need to do that. So we’ve learned that there’s certain things that we should invest our money in. But there’s services we can reach out to vendors that provide a service that they are the ones making that capital investment of that piece of equipment. So trying to explain to kids,  just because it’s new and it’s cool, we don’t necessarily need to buy it. Because we will never use it enough to justify its cost. Whereas something like a sprayer, I can spray and the kids can spray when we need to, so a sprayer is a better investment because I can use it throughout the summer or into the early growing season or late part of the growing season, and a kid can run it and they get experience. Same thing with a tractor and a mower, those are better investments for me than say a fraze mower, a deep tine aerator, that kind of thing, which in 1991, people didn’t use. The cultivation practices that are happening now were never done when I was a student and they definitely weren’t done in the beginning of my career. But I still realize and I’m aware that those are still pieces of equipment that are essential to what we do, but we don’t need to invest in those. When it comes to grass varities, is it time for us to have a new grass variety? Absolutely. But they change so much. If you asked me 10 years ago, everybody’s moving to Patriot, now Patriot is kind of like, it’s nice, it’s got problems. Now people went to Northbridge and Latitude, so now it’s another variety. So we kind of want to sit back and wait for it all to happen, so next thing you know it’ll be 1968 again and we’ll have the same variety. We’re moving forward, the discussions we’ve been trying to have with athletic administration and things like that. It’s like it’s time for us to invest in a new grass system. So we’re looking at hopefully a variety upgrade in the next couple of years, it’s slower acting, but if I could pull the trigger today and resprig, I would do it today. You know that’s a capital project. You know, our irrigation systems, those types of things. A lot of them, people don’t realize too school systems aren’t driven by profits, so I don’t have the luxury of saying, “It’s going to increase the playability and our chances of winning and our chances of winning are going to yield greater ticket sales, in theory… not like a professional baseball or professional softball or any other professional sport, they’re driven by profit. We’ve gotta find ways to… it’s a big decision to renovate an irrigation system for us. Renovating a track is a huge decision, and they say what’s the value in return? What’s the long-term impact of it? We need to do some things because we haven’t done a lot of capital improvements, but that happens with education. There’s always projects that take years to work out. So we always throw our hat in the pile and say hopefully we can get one. But equipment for us, we’re trying to make sure that… we’re not just a one-horse show. I’ve got a 4000 square foot greenhouse, we’ve got a shop with mechanics that we’ve got to keep going too. We’re investing in welding technology, greenhouse technology. Those are things that aren’t inexpensive either. We’re not just a one-dimensional program, we have a broad program within our agriculture and horticulture department. So it’s a lot of stuff to consider. And like I said, we’re one of four schools, so take the pie and cut it in four pieces first, then you have to look at what money you have and what you need. We do a lot of fundraising and things like that, so trying to keep up with technology is hard because it does change so fast. I’m excited I have a GPS bar on my sprayer so I at least know I’m going in a straight line. But that’s still technology we talk about, that’s how I keep kids current is show videos and things of people in our community and there are several vendors that we work with that do some amazing stuff. And fortunately for me too they’ll reach out to us and sometimes they’ll bring demos out, show kids what we do at the other level. We’re fortunate we have lots of connections in professional sports so we can show people, here’s what the Baltimore Orioles are doing, here’s what the Washington Nationals are doing, here’s what the Washington Football Team is doing. A lot of universities, Virginia Tech and UVA both are on the top of the heap around here, and Liberty. All different things that people are doing and so they’re not much further than a phone call away to get that information to kids. That’s how we stay current.

TTZ: So what I’m hearing and what a lot of employers are hearing is that the kids coming out of your program have heard and learned some perspective on resources and how to use them, they’re not just coming out thinking they need all the newest and best equipment, they’ve got to be —

MM: One thing I try to tell employers is, “I wouldn’t send a kid to you I wouldn’t hire myself.” They’re going to be competent, they’re not going to necessarily know everything about that one machine that you have, but they understand about equipment and how things run so it won’t take them long to get up to speed. I can’t teach them, I don’t have the ability to mow grass like in a golf situation, down to an eighth of an inch. It just doesn’t work where we are but you know that’s the job of the employers to give them that other thing. And I try to tell kids, take jobs where you can learn something. I was under the guidance when I was a young adult, when I was in high school, go places where people can teach you things. I don’t dis on kids who work at grocery stores and fast food places, that just wasn’t me. When I worked at Southern States, as soon as I started working I started learning how to deal with customers, how to work with fertilizers and all different types of commodities and within the day I was like, I didn’t know that… and it was constant learning, every day was a new thing to learn. My dad told me a long time ago, once somebody teaches it to you, you walk away and it’s still yours. When somebody invests in you and gives you knowledge, when you leave that for another opportunity, you take that with you. I always tell kids, take a job where you can learn and at the end of the day you can walk away and still have that knowledge. Not that you couldn’t get that at another type of employment, but if you have an interest in the industry and you’re young and you don’t chase a dollar. The other thing I tell kids is if you’ve got a place you’re learning and it’s in the industry you want to be in, don’t walk away for a dollar more an hour where you’ve got the rest of your life to make money. Take advantage a learn and let somebody pay you to learn. I think that’s hard for people sometimes to wrap their mind around – a young adult. Now if I was 25 years old and I have to make sure that I’ve got to protect my long-term livelihood, but if you’re 16 or 17 years old, you really don’t know what debt is, you don’t owe things. You may have a used car debt, but that’s not really real debt. I tell my students, you’ve got the rest of your life to make money. Go learn and take advantage of somebody who’s willing to teach you. Let them teach you on their time. You’re going to be a better employee, just overall better. Then when you go get that dream job you want, you’re going to have all those bits of knowledge that somebody else imparted on you that you can bring to the table. It’s just another tool in the toolbox. It’s hard for people to look at it that way, they look at a new cell phone, and I’ve gotta pay for this, pay for that… I’m like, well, do you have to pay for it? Is it something you need? Want and need – I’m trying to be a good advisor to a kid, trying to explain to them there’s things that we all want, but there’s things we need and so you have to draw that line somewhere. I still get told that all the time–

TTZ: That’s a lifelong lesson for sure. Something I noticed that you do that I haven’t heard many other high school programs do is that your students do pesticide applicator certification. As a mother of a teenage person and being around kids sometimes, that makes me a little nervous… talk me through, is that a challenge to get those kids to understand why that’s important and certification is fantastic, but how do you walk through that program with them when lots of working adults in the industry struggle with that?

MM: I think the first thing is that anybody who’s around pesticides, the first thing everybody should do is do their due diligence to educate themselves, so I say that to the public, my administrators, anybody. Before you go and get extremely upset and I agree public perception, as well it should be, because there’s been a lot of bad things done with pesticides in the past. First thing I tell kids is—a question I ask all kids, and they can say yes, and I could not say yes when I was a kid, I ask them, raise you hand if any of you have ever seen a bald eagle in the wild. Every single kid in my class could almost raise their hand. When I was their age, sat in this classroom, I had never, ever seen a bald eagle in the wild. That’s the difference in 30 years. The reason is because they pulled DDT off the market, they realized the danger it has to birds of prey, and the impact it had on the American Bald Eagle was the reason why that product was pulled off the market. It is the biggest success story of a lesson learned in pesticide usage that everybody go “uh-oh, we messed up.” But it’s also proof that people can learn from a mistake and the environment was able to recover. And today now these kids can say I went to the river and saw a bald eagle. Yes, we get a black eye because of what we did in the past. I go through this with our science department because they’re reading textbooks written based on information from a while back. There’s all sorts of things we can look at, and that’s how everybody learns, we screwed up somewhere. Nobody ever learns through discovery, it’s all through mistakes. That’s how we teach science, that’s how we teach most things in schools, is things that have happened in the past have taught us how to do things now. One of the things I try to explain to them is the stigma, which there should be, is that pesticides are bad, the reality is not all pesticides are bad, and most of us use pesticides on a fairly regular basis and don’t even think twice about it being a pesticide. I ask them, “how many people here went to a ballgame at the Little League the other day?” And half of them will raise their hand, how many put bug spray on, and every one of them raise their hand. Well, what do you think it is? It’s a pesticide. Trying to put it all in perspective and then on top of that try to give them good information. The first thing we teach when we start talking about pesticides is integrated pest management, explaining to them that integrated pest management, our number one goal is not to use pesticide. What can we do, what are the steps we can follow that allow us to solve the problem well before we get to the pesticide situation? Can we change it through rotation of crops? Can we change it through better cultural practices, managing irrigation better, aerate to remove compaction that prevents a particular weed from taking over. Is our nutrient plan up to snuff so that these other plants that usually are advantitious during these low fertility situations take over. What is it that we can do ahead of time that fixes the problem, because our goal is not to apply pesticides. A couple of reasons – 1. It looks bad to soccer moms and dads when you have a sign out that says pesticides have been applied. It looks bad because financially it’s a lot more expensive to apply pesticide than to do other things. So we try to tell them, I’m going to teach you how to use them, use them safely, and how to communicate with them in such a way that they understand what you’re about to do is not dangerous. Or you’re doing everything you can possibly do to mitigate the danger. So trying to explain the process to them, and what I have learned is that kids are better teachers because I teach them en masse. So its one thing for me to tell somebody it’s not a problem, but when I have 20 kids who have been educated in the subject and they show up to class and whoever is talking… we had a civics class who brought in a person not long ago and the person was just bashing everything about modern agriculture, landscape principles and things and I kind of felt like I needed Tom Tracy with me because he would have had a good answer, but the kids really worked the guy over pretty good. It’s because they were educated in modern chemistry, they weren’t educated in DDT, they weren’t hung up on Durisband and all the bad ones from way back. They weren’t hung up that. They were like, do you understand that this has to happen first? And the person didn’t know that. Same thing with nutrients, people are like, you’re overapplying fertilizer. One, it’s too expensive to overapply, it’s a financial risk that we take just applying fertilizers. And I’m not about to throw fertilizers down right into the drain or into the water. That’s even more of a financial loss, and it’s just poor practices. Most people don’t realize the steps that we go through before we even apply a bag of fertilizer. So the one thing that our fertilizer or pesticide training does is, it educates the kids and hopefully educates their parents that the first thing we’re trying to avoid is the application of that pesticide. Then if we do have to, the kids are all taught the proper procedures for mixing and loading and application and all that goes through, I’ve seen people take a couple of days to teach pesticide training, we spend three weeks or four weeks on it, because it’s important, but I also want them to be successful when they take their exams. The other thing that I do, every time they take the pesticide exam, I do too, so it keeps me up to date and it also makes sure I’m teaching the kids what they need to learn and be successful. So our pesticide applicators license is a private applicators exam so it only has use in the production of a commodity on privately held lands, so it’s the same… in Virginia you can be 16 years old in a commodity situation and on privately held land, you can apply restricted use pesticide. Kids are like, that’s crazy! And I’m like, do you know how many restricted use pesticides I’ve ever applied? I said I’ve been doing this now since 2001 and I’ve never even bought one. I can, but I don’t need to. So I think it’s the perception of danger versus actual danger. With the new pesticides that are hitting the industry, it’s like, we’re using things in grams per acre, not gallons per acre. The use of pesticides is so different now than it was even 15 years ago. So I think I equate it back, in the 70s, we used a flamethrower now we have a sniper. We’ve got a pesticide that is very target-specific and it takes out one problem or a series of small problems versus before we used a flamethrower. We just put it down and, yeah we got that, but we also took out some other things. So just trying to get kids to understand the precision now that’s in place. They’re the best people that I can send out into the world to communicate with the general public about the safe thing. You know, the highest order of thinking is being able to get somebody to take that knowledge and teach it again. That’s been super helpful for us. And that extends not just to pesticides, but to nutrients and things like that. I remember a kid told me one day, “I told my science teacher that he needed to talk to you before they have that lesson again.” I was like, great, I’m in trouble now. He said it in such a way that they understood that they were not necessarily wrong, but they weren’t accurate in the current trends in the industry. I was really impressed that he spoke up because he wasn’t one of those kids that typically does that, but he just felt like, you’re not telling them the wrong thing, but you’re telling them not the most current information, and I think you should maybe check with Mr. Moran because he could catch you up to speed on the new stuff. I was like, I’m going to be hearing that at a faculty meeting. But I really felt proud of him for speaking up because he’s right. He wants the industry to be projected in a positive manner, not just the turf industry, but agriculture in general. There’s a lot more to it than people realize. I had a good opportunity not long ago to speak to an AP Biology class. They came in here and they learned about hydroponics and we have a pretty substantial hydroponics program and next thing you know, they didn’t expect the horticulture teacher to be talking about cation and anions and positive charges and negative charges of particles and molecules. They were like, that wasn’t what we were expecting. We were just talking about pH, and not a single person in that class knew what pH was. So it was our opportunity to teach them, they just thought this classroom down here was doing hick-ish kinds of things. I had a good opportunity to teach them and the kids were like, I don’t think anybody knew what you were going to tell them. So it worked out really well. We get that all the time.

TTZ: I like that those building blocks are there, one- for responsible use of any chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides that you’re using, and that the scientific foundation is there too, because I think that’s an industry wide perception issue where we’re presenting ourselves as professionals in turfgrass management, not just the guy who’s mowing the lawn. Starting where you are with high school students and ingraining that knowledge early that they can communicate that to others is a huge step for the future of the industry. A focus now with VTC and even the local and national STMAs environmentally conscious management and I love that it’s starting the groundwork where you are.

MM: A lot of our kids – people ask me, how many kids go into the industry. I say, well, it’s like any other content area, we’re happy if 10% of our kids go into the industry and we probably get that or a little bit more. But the big thing for me is, at the end of the day, all of my students are educated consumers. They’re the people that can go out there and they don’t have to rely on somebody at a box store telling them how much fertilizer to put down because they’ve done the math already and they know how much. Now that reading the bag – and the bag doesn’t know what your soil sample said, but the kid does. So at the very least our kids are walking out as educated consumers and they’re able to put themselves in a situation where they’re not being taken advantage of by somebody who rolls up in a pickup truck and says, “I cut grass.” And well, I’m looking for a lawn professional, I’m not looking for someone who just cuts grass. Then they can have an educated discussion with that potential vendor and say, here’s what I’m interested in, and can you provide that service? And at the very least our kids walk out educated consumers, so I think that’s almost as important as putting someone in the industry because they actually protect people that are professionals in the industry by being that way.

TTZ: Alright, I’m just going to shift gears entirely and I’ve got to ask about your spring this year with double seasons and multiple sports. I follow you on Twitter and I’ve seen some of the work that your kids have done.  Talk to me about how that all came together and how you executed that for multiple seasons …

MM: Our COVID situation? So we’re no different than any other school who’s had to run sports. We closed school March 16^th or so of 2020. I’m on extended contract, my colleague and I are on extended contracts, both of us so our principal was like, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if we’re going back in two weeks, so we need to be prepared. At the time our spring season was, most of our teams had played one scrimmage and we weren’t sure when we came back from spring break if we were going to be in school. We were preparing the whole time as if we were and then of course when we got back from spring break it wasn’t long after that that they told us that we were going to be closed the rest of the year. But I run a greenhouse too and this field behind me on the screen it still runs. I told the principal when he said they don’t want anybody here, I was like, this monster still goes and does its thing every day, I still have to take care of it. The first thing we did was we reached out to the school system like what do we do? Because these facilities, you just can’t turn the lights off and walk out the door, it’s got to be maintained. So we figured out what protocols we needed to follow in order to be safe. So that was the first thing was working with school board administration on exactly what we could do. Then we kind of spent the whole summer not knowing. So we went from March 16^th, we transitioned our product out – what do we do? Once we knew the school year was over, we went ahead the first of April or so and basically transitioned all of our overseeded fields back to pure Bermuda and then just said we’ll have a super grow-in year. We started our grow-in for the fall not knowing what was going to happen in the fall in late-April, early May and started to build the stadium and all of the game facilities and practice facilities. We got our sprigging, just prepared as if we were going to be playing sports. As we got closer to the month of August, it was apparent that that wasn’t going to happen. We just continued to do our thing. As a school system, we shifted – we were on an every other day system traditionally since 1991, where we have what they call an A/B Block, so we have four classes on A day and a different four classes on a B day and those would alternate every other day. The school system decided at that point we were going to go to a 4×4 system. So I had a semester of only four classes, we met every day. Then the second semester we’d have a new group of four classes that meet every day. That was a big challenge for us because we were used to having alternating courses, so certain classes would do things on certain days and that all went out the window. So I only had one turf class, because we dropped enrollment only about 20, maybe 30% of our student population elected to go online. We still had over 1000 students in school and we were also one of the few school systems in the state that you were able to go fulltime. So we didn’t have kids on Monday and Tuesday and then a break, different kids on Thursday, Friday. We had the same kids every day for five days. So we were in person right out the shoot. September 8^th or so we were full tilt in-person. Lots of protocols in place – mask wearing, the whole deal, cleaning we had to do meet the requirements for the state of Virginia Health Department. So with all that going on, we knew we weren’t having fall sports, but we still had a facility we had to manage. So we spent a lot of time in the fall doing all of our seeding applications, fertilizer applications, cleanups, whatever we needed for pesticides and we still carried class out as if we were having fall season, we just didn’t do a lot of heavy field work. Which was really tough because we’re usually swamped with the fields – two practice facilities that needed to get worked out every day. We used to have three practice facilities – field hockey, two practice fields for our football program, then we had the stadium. So those fields plus a middle school field that we maintained that to help out with our lacrosse program and middle football uses that. We still managed our fields, we just didn’t mark anything, we didn’t paint anything. So it saved us a lot of money on paint budget, but we knew going into October that we were going to have some sort of fall sports season and it wasn’t really outlined really strongly yet but we were going to do something, but that was going to happen in the winter. So we’re going to be putting traffic on a field that’s most the time it’s dormant when we’re on it, never been dormant playing on it and all the sudden we’re going to play on that field and it had to survive all of a fall season, and then all of a spring season. So we had winter sports typically when winter sports are going to be held indoors, then we rolled into late-February or so, into March and all the sudden we’re going to have fall sports. So we’re going to prepare for field hockey and football on our fields and somehow maintain cover. One of the challenges with our coaches was we had to say we have developed a very effective traffic plan because that’s a big thing that I’ve always focused on because it doesn’t cost us any money to manage traffic. We just tell coaches to rotate, put a cone out versus painting a line, anything we can to be creative in how we coach, that will same us a tremendous amount of resources and keep then field playable for not just your season, now we’ve gotta look to another season after you. So we really committed on our game facilities to a heave overseeding program, so we could manage traffic on stadiums pretty effectively because we knew that there was only going to be so many field hockey games in a given span of time, so many football games in a span of time. We could keep out stadiums under close watch. What we couldn’t do was really give the attention to the practice facilities so we really had to rely on coaches to be very disciplined in how they practice. That came from, I coach as well, at the middle school, so we didn’t have any middle school sports, I did whatever I could to help the coaching staffs out of all the different staffs. If I was to coach this drill, this is how I would do it. Try to think differently, change the way we coach versus telling them not to do it, move over here, do it over here. So we tried to do the things we could to make some out of play areas playable so they could carry out things to reduce traffic. It wasn’t always perfect, I would get heartburn at night looking at things, but also I couldn’t tell a coach not to coach either, so it’s a balancing act of what can you do and being able to find the fine line of let’s make this choice where we’re at. Even the Athletic Administration had to decide, tonight’s not going to be a good night to play, what would be a good time? So we had to move some games around, maybe cancel, and all that kind of stuff because we knew because of the dormant nature of the bermudagrass fields, if we did a lot of damage, we weren’t going to recover for spring. We felt like we had to do everything we can to preserve the playing surface for the whole. So we had to make a decision for the whole and not for the few. That’s hard for coaches because coaches are right here, they’re focused on their thing and I understand that too because I’m the same way when I’m doing my thing. So you have to explain to them, this is a different situation than we’ve ever been in before. As a grower it’s really difficult, so we pulled it off. We covered things up when we had to, we put blankets out when we had to, we had rules in place for games that you couldn’t warm up… in soccer and lacrosse we asked our visiting teams and home team not to use the game creases and the game goal areas to pregame. We would slide the goal over 10 feet and we’d say pregame here and when the game starts, we’ll slide the goal back over to the crease. You wouldn’t think that mattered, but if you slid it yesterday 10 feet to the left and then the next game 10 feet to the right, we could spread traffic out over a long period of time. This was the first year I haven’t had the resources to resprig and resod goal mouths. We learned new ways to do things, so it’s forced us to be creative so I’m thankful for that. I had a crew of seven kids, that’s what I had in my second semester class because the way some kids were able to get their electives they wanted. I only had seven kids that could get their electives, so I managed an entire football season with seven kids, an entire soccer season and lacrosse season and field hockey season with seven kids. But if I could’ve picked seven kids, I’m glad I picked those seven. Because we didn’t have a lazy one in the bunch, they all knew exactly what to do. You could tell three to go this way, four to go that way, turn your back to them, you knew the three were working and the four were working. I give a lot of credit to them because they were very disciplined. I think it’s because I bought two-way radios for them all, so they were all within earshot. But it worked out as a way to communicate and that’s stuff that we didn’t think about.  When COVID hit we had to find new ways – everyone got their own set of gloves, their own pruners. We had to really get creative, it wasn’t just outside, we had to do it inside too. We had a greenhouse situation, totally different world. So our shop situation, every kid had their own toolbox. Before we didn’t have that, so this was really a good idea to do it this way, we lost less tools doing it this way. We didn’t have pruners missing because some kid put them somewhere, he was responsible every day to put his pruners back. It was that way with our equipment too. The kids really took care of things. As bad as everything was in 2021 and 2020, we kind of came out of it with a lot of positives. The fields played well, the kids played well, we were fortunate. I’m very proud of what they did. Took lots of pictures.

TTZ: So now that you’ve survived those extra challenges and come out on the other side better, let’s close with this. What are your goals for the program going forward, beyond maintaining the structure and the students that you have now? What do you hope you guys do when grow through the future.

MM: You talk about the environmental side of things, now I think we do things really well, we’re pretty responsible. I think to get a rubber stamp on what you’re doing, whether it’s a Ducks Unlimited type of thing, or if it’s Autobahn society, we’re looking down that road to submit ourselves as an environmental stewardship program. We’re looking right now, we’ve pulled the application out for the STMA Environmental Facility. It’s important to me because it once again paints our program in the light that it should be painted, that we are very responsible about what we do and how we do it. We’re not being reckless with our nutrients, with our pesticides. We’re trying to be very conscious about the environment overall, water quality being a big thing. That’s a goal for us is in the next year to two, we have that plaque on the wall. I constantly look for ways to get kids recognition. One of the biggest things that we’ve been able to do through support of the county is to develop our Twitter account and our social media presence because the kids are working hard and they’re doing things—and I’ll say that about there are programs all around our community that are turf programs. I’m just one small program, but you have Drew Miller up at Brentsville that’s done some amazing stuff. Drew and I, when he started off we sat down and talked a long time about what we do and how we do it. We’re different in a lot of ways, but we’re very similar. Go to Louisa County, sit down and talk to Logan, he does his stuff differently, has a different background than I have, but we all know what we want and we get the best out of our kids and that’s the best you can do. You start moving out to the valley and you see a lot of growth in programs out there. And then southwest Virginia, lots of opportunities. One of the things that we want to see, and the thing that Dr. Sandor and Dr. Goatley at Tech have been really big on, we’re trying to open up to more youth. And it’s not just a program like mine that has a program, but with FFA opportunities, kids and contests. There’s a career development event that Dr. Goatley, myself and several other people have been trying for a long time to get going at the national FFA, but we learned from them that they want to see them started grassroots. So we’ve worked with a lot of states to get a state FFA career development event contest for kids to do at Virginia Tech in the summertime. We had one two years ago, and of course COVID threw a monkey wrench into last summer, but we went, participated in that. I think that was one of those things that  for Virginia Tech, it was an eye opening experience because there was a lot of kids and it’s not just kids in my program, there’s kids maybe at Turner Ashby High School or Fort Defiance High School or John S Battle High School… somewhere else that may not have a turfgrass program that kids that are interested in this kind of stuff. They may be avid golfers, may be running a pick up truck starter up operation and want to be long-term professional lawn care guys, their interest in turf is just as strong as my kids’. So get kids opportunities to participate and recognized for achievement, I think that’s important. I’d like to see more of my kids end up at Virginia Tech, or any other program across the country that offers turf science. I’m awful proud of all of my alumni that are in the industry today. I was proud to have kids, I had a kid that did an internship at the Padres, one do an internship at the Miami Marlins, kids on PGA courses that were in US Open. I’m tickled to death that they’re doing that kind of stuff, and kids who’ve been in the industry and they find out they have other passions and go somewhere else. As long as you have passion about it, I don’t care. Be passionate about whatever you want to be, but I still have kids who now have home lawn that call us and say, “I remember doing this in class, am I doing this right?” and start sending pictures. Next you know, they’re striping their front yard a certain way. But I’ve got some alumni that have done super super well in the local lawn care business and I still call on them now because they have technology I don’t have. I’m always tickled and I tell them sometimes, I’ve gotta go out and do internships somewhere in the summertime, so let me know if you need help. I’ve worked for some of them – you the boss, whatever you tell me to do, I do it. Long-term, we just want to continue to be relevant, and I think with the things that are happening in the industry today there’s a lot of opportunity for our kids to help paint the industry in the light that it should be painted in. We see it all the time now, professional sports, how important it is for people to recognize natural grass versus synthetic and that’s a big debate, but our kids understand the answers and the rationale for different things. You can’t talk about one without talking about the other and our kids are definitely people who are educated.

TTZ: You definitely have an excellent program and I know that other programs around Virginia and elsewhere are looking to you guys as trailblazers and you certainly have earned that recognition. Thank you for spending some time with me today.