Tennessee Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
Tennessee Turfgrass Magazine: How did you get into turfgrass management? 
Ryan Storey: I loved baseball my whole life and played as long as I could until I figured out it wasn’t going to pay bills. I had a mentor back home in Bill Marbet, who got me into turfgrass. Once I found out I wasn’t going to play ball, he was like, “Well, you like working on ball fields, let’s see what we can do.” He had a contact down at Mississippi State and had a job lined up for me on the grounds crew. So I went to Mississippi for a four-year education in turfgrass management. 
TTM: What was the career path, once you got out of school, all of those different jobs and moves, did you go in as a sports turf manager? How did you progress to get to where you are today? 
RS: When I graduated from Mississippi State, I wanted to stay close to Starkville. I wanted to stay close to my wife (we weren’t married at the time), so I took a job at Ole Miss as the Assistant Sports Turf Manager doing all of their athletic fields and facilities. Once my wife graduated, we got married and she moved in and we hung around for a little while. She’d never lived further than an hour and a half away from home, so she wanted to get out and see the area and I told her to pick a spot and I’d see if I could find a job. She picked New Orleans and we moved to a nice little town just north of New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain called Mandeville. I was at a 36-hole country club with hydraulic irrigation in the deep south. It’s not fun, I don’t recommend it to anybody.
So we stayed there for two years and had a kid on the way. I grew up with grandparents and I wanted my kids to have grandparents. So we made the decision to either move back to Mississippi or back to Tennessee, and she said that Tennessee would work, so we moved back home and here we are. 
TTM: So you had a period of time there that you were on a golf course instead of in sports turf. How was that different and what was your overall feeling about being in golf? 
RS: It’s a lot of grass. 36 holes, like I said, with hydraulic irrigation. If you’ve never experienced working on a golf course, you need to just for your career’s sake, because you appreciate those guys a lot more. When you’re there when the sun comes up and you’re leaving when the sun goes down, you’re out and about with the members. It was a lot of grass, a lot of heights of grass. I’d never really worked on greens that much, I was always a sports turf guy, so getting that aspect of it can make anybody a better turf manager. Just having to fine-tune everything, trying to bring some of the golf agronomics over into the sports turf agronomics, it was an eye-opener for sure. 
TTM: So let’s talk about your current job at Vanderbilt. How many fields and how many people are on your team? What does your standard work day look like now?
RS: Vanderbilt is unique in the fact that we don’t just do the grass things, we do the paved surfaces, parking garages, residential halls, a couple of off-campus properties. I have a crew of two guys who come in at night, they do our parking garages, help out where needed if we can get some stuff done at night.
Our main focus is our sports turf crew and we have four guys, plus myself. We have a synthetic football field, a synthetic baseball field, synthetic football practice field, a synthetic indoor facility, and one synthetic intramural field. Then our natural surfaces are a soccer/lacrosse stadium, which is a shared facility between the soccer team and the lacrosse team so that one never gets a break. Football has a natural grass practice field, we have our track infield, which doubles as a practice facility for soccer or lacrosse. Whichever sport is not in season, they go up there and practice. Then we have three natural grass intramural fields that we mow, line,