Mississippi Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
The Turf Zone: Welcome to The Turf Zone. In this episode of Mississippi Turfgrass, we’re talking Will Arnett, Director of Golf Operations and instructor at Lion Hills Club at East Mississippi Community College. Hi Will, how are you doing?
Will Arnett: Doing great, thanks.
TTZ: Thanks so much for joining us. We’re talking to you as a member spotlight about your background and what you do in the industry, so why don’t we start at the beginning and tell me a little bit about how you got into the turfgrass industry.
WA: I was a college student, ironically enough at East Mississippi Community College, playing baseball with no real plan of what to do with my life, other than I didn’t want to be inside the rest of my life. I happened to get a summer job after my first year of junior college, which would have been summer of ’89 at Mississippi State’s golf course for Mr. Tim Lacy. Tim kind of took me under his wing there. After that summer, he basically offered me an opportunity to come back the following summer. He talked to me about the turfgrass program at Mississippi State, which I had no idea about. I grew up in Starkville and had no idea about that program. So Tim presented that option to me. I went back and played baseball another year, came back and work for Tim again. At that point, I enrolled in the program there at Mississippi State. Like I said, Tim took me under his wing, gave me some direction on where to go. I started my internships and it just really took off from there. 
TTZ: That’s a really interesting story – I feel like I hear that a lot from turfgrass managers. They really didn’t know that this was a career path and it was through sports or somebody that wasb working in that field that you learn – this is a job and you can be on a baseball field and actually working. Do you see a lot of that at the school, coming in, folks who have learned about this profession through sports?
WA: I think we see a lot of kids, predominantly kids that have been in athletics, for sure. I think that seems to be a path, somehow, someway – whether that’s they just wanted to be outside, or grew up outside, played golf, played baseball, whatever it may be. I think that is a direct path. I think you see a ton more, I know we do, and I think the industry does, a lot more students that are directed to the sports field industry. When I was in school, it really wasn’t a deal. Bart Prather that’s now the director of campus landscape at Mississippi State was really the first guy I knew that left college and went and did some stuff for the University of Arkansas sports fields. So it really wasn’t a thing when I was in school. It was really golf, golf, golf – only golf. But now you see a lot of kids that will come to do the landscape part and a whole lot that are really coming to do sports turf. Which I think is flooding the market. We have trouble fulfilling all the job requests we get and I think a lot of that over the last 5-6 years, with the craze of travel ball and municipalities building better baseball complexes and soccer complexes, you’ve got a lot of students going into that side of things. It’s definitely a path that you see kids that are athletic, that have been playing sports come to. 
TTZ: Absolutely. Do you feel like the demand for golf and lawn and landscape sectors of the industry are getting what they need as far as labor and kids coming out of school? 
WA: I think so, and I’ve seen an uptick in that. I think we went through, obviously as everybody did, some downfall from some recession type issues, that the golf industry was not as strong as it would have been back in the ‘90s and early 2000s. But I do see that ticking back up. You might see schools don’t have maybe quite the enrollment numbers that they used to. At least the larger school, but here at the community college, we keep 20-30 students.