Arkansas Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
The Turf Zone: Welcome to The Turf Zone. Today we’re talking to Chuck Cross, Turf Management and P.E. teacher at Ashdown High School in Ashdown High School. Chuck, thanks for joining me.
Chuck Cross: Thank you for having me.
TTZ: Alright, Chuck, we want to talk today and let Arkansas turfgrass managers, members of Arkansas Turfgrass Association know about your turf management program, so let’s start at the beginning of that and tell me a little bit about how the program was started.
CC: With quarantine, it’s been a crazy year in education, so it started… I guess everybody’s phone time has went up since everybody’s been quarantined. It started with just me looking at turfgrass program through Twitter, social media, because I’ve been kind of doing it on my own, with the help of the baseball team and assistant coaches in the last seven years, and I ran upon South Forsythe, Georgia’s Twitter page and just screenshot it and sent it to our superintendent, and I was like, we should think about doing this here at Ashdown, because I know their baseball coach runs it, and it was just an idea. I wanted to start it in the fall of this year, 2021, when we come back to school, and that was in October of last year. And we had a meeting and he was like, “Let’s just start it right now.” And the superintendent, the athletic director, the curriculum director, the principals have been great, the counselors, because they had to change schedules. We just started it on a whim and in November, started it, I kind of just drew from kids that were blended, and then we actually started the class as soon as we came back from Christmas break, in 2021.
TTZ: So did you have a lot of student interest? Is that something maybe that came from sports, were there kids that already knew about turfgrass management as a skill or a job path?
CC: We had some interest over the years. I think probably two or three of my baseball players have gone on to do small lawn businesses. And then we have BWI, which is in Texarkana, it’s a big corporation that provides people with pesticides… anything you want for lawncare and we have a couple guys that work over there. And then we have a bunch of golf courses around. And we’re probably the only grass field around, but kids have been interested for a while, and when I just started telling P.E. kids and started telling baseball and football players, and then some girls too that I was going to have a class, I had a lot of interest and I could only make it… I had to downsize it for the first year. I think next year it’s going to be fairly big.
TTZ: That’s awesome that you’ve gotten a lot of interest. I think a big struggle in the industry is just having people understand that this can be a really great career, and there are levels of it that, like you mentioned, kids can come out of high school and they can have their smaller lawn
businesses, or there are higher education paths to turfgrass management careers, so getting a little bit of exposure this early on and understanding it as the career path is huge in building the next generation, I guess, of turfgrass management. So thinking about that career path and that build up to that job, tell me a little bit about your background. Have you been in turfgrass management or have you always been in education?
CC: I’ve always been in education, I feel like in my second life I’m going to be a golf course superintendent. But I love golf, I try to compete at a lower level, my kids love golf, my wife loves golf. So, you get that background where you love going to a nice golf course. Me and my son play at Texarkana Country Club. It’s traditional, it’s a pretty prestigious course over in Texarkana. Byron Nelson was a club pro there at one time. But I think maybe my interest came from my grandpa, just his yard.