Tennessee Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
Tell us about your work at Ensworth and what that includes– your fields, areas you manage and how many people are on your team.
I’ve been at Ensworth for five years. I started as an assistant at our lower school campus, which is just off of West End. I’m now the Head of Grounds at the high school campus, but I oversee the lower school campus as well. We have 13 natural grass fields, about six of those are premiere, performance-style fields that we maintain at a higher level.
Between the two campuses, we sit somewhere between 150 and 200 acres of total area. I oversee the landscaping through a third party, which is Brightview. They take care of our landscape, our hardscapes and all that that entails. We have a great partnership with them. They do a fantastic job of maintaining our campus grounds. My crew consists of me and four guys, and we oversee all of our sports fields and irrigation.
 
The Ensworth School is a really well-known private school, and you’ve got some some top-level athletes there. There are kids who are playing with goals of, for instance, playing Division I football, and you’ve really got some pretty high standards there. Tell us about maintaining premiere properties for those athletes.
 My crew takes a lot of pride in knowing that players that play on our fields go to college. We play a very small part of it, but when we see a kid signed for Minnesota, Tennessee or Ohio State, we take a lot of pride in knowing that we provided them a high-level sports field, but at the same time a very safe sports field. When they play at home, I’m always very nervous when we see an injury. I’m immediately messaging the trainer – what was it? Was it caused by the field, was it caused by something else? They’ve honestly gotten in the habit of texting me as soon as they know, saying ‘not field-related’ or whatever. But knowing that these players, they’re going to the next level after playing here, our ultimate goal is to make sure that this is the best field they’ve ever played on. Not only from an aesthetics point of view, but from a safety point of view.
 
With the large scope of grounds and fields that you maintain, what’s the biggest challenge?
 That’s a complex question… the hardest part is being able to do what we need to do when we need to do it. You accomplish that by building relationships with your coaches, and them knowing that what we do is important, so they’re usually really flexible in allowing us to do our jobs, knowing that we’re doing it for a reason. So scheduling is probably the toughest aspect.
Weather changes everything. I can be planning to go out and aerate a field today, but we might get two inches of rain the night before and I can’t accomplish my goal. So being able to be flexible, not only because of Mother Nature, but with the coaches, is probably the most important. It’s not the most challenging, because we’ve built such a good relationship with the coaches. The most challenging is accomplishing everything we need to accomplish within a certain amount of time.
 
At the TTA awards this year, you got the 2020 high school field of the year for the football field at Ensworth, and you received a leadership award with STMA. You also presented at the TTA conference. What does that recognition mean to you?
 The leadership award was presented to a group of us that were on a committee for some work we did with STMA this year. That was a fantastic honor – honestly if I didn’t tell you I almost came to tears when I found out, I’d be lying to you. But you know every honor we’ve been presented from the very end of 2019, through the beginning of 2021, has been a great honor. Being presented Field of the Year was amazing because we didn’t apply for it this year, we kind of held off applying for it and somebody else did that for us and that was pretty am...