Tennessee Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
How did you get involved in this line of work and what was your career path?
Many years ago when my two sons were playing Little League baseball, the dads had to work on the fields, and I owned a tire business here in Columbia. With us dads working on the ball fields, one thing led to another and it became a passion. Other people started to ask us, “Can you come look at our dirt?” or “Can you come look at our mound?”
I had the opportunity to sell my tire business, and I told my wife that we’re going to take a huge leap of faith and chase the passion. In 1996 we started Southern Athletic Fields and grew that until 2018, when we sold SAF to Profile Products. Since then I’ve done a little for them, but now we’ve branched out and started a couple other companies. We have Game Time Sports Fields, it’s renovation, grading, whatever needs to be done on an athletic field, we try to do it. Then Line to Line is accessory based – netting and painting, bases, drags, all the other things that I enjoy doing. We’re trying to reinvent the wheel and come up with new, and maybe sometimes better, ideas on how to maintain baseball and softball fields.
Have you always primarily worked in baseball and softball, or have you ventured into other sports?
We painted and striped football and soccer fields, we’ve done a lot of topdressing and grading of football and soccer fields. So we’re not just baseball and softball, but I think most people know me as “The Dirt Guy,” so that’s kind of where we’ve had our home.
Do you do a lot of turfgrass maintenance, or do you rely on someone else to work with you while you’re doing dirt work?
We have some partners that do most of the turf part of it. We have tried over the years to specialize in the ballfield dirts, mound clays, and the particular types of infield mixes. We’ve been very fortunate from the Little Leagues to high school to colleges to Major League fields to have our particular type of infield mix.
Some people call you the “King of Dirt.” How did you earn that title?
Well, that was not my idea. I think there’s one reason they call me that, no one else ever wanted to be tagged with that label. We’ve always said, it’s not just dirt. There’s a lot more to it. From the beginning when we’d just find something that was kind of red that would work on a ballfield, and we’d begin to understand what made this particular blend work. So we started getting into the differences between sand, silt and clay. We started looking at the different components of dirt and we started looking at the percentages of sand, the percentages of silt, the percentages of clay.
Not all areas are the same, so we got into that and found the proper blend, if you will. We were very fortunate. I’ve driven thousands of miles, and when you see red dirt, you think, “Well, that’s it.” We were fortunate to find an area that it did work and the percentages were there. Early on, that was before people got into what’s called engineered soils, but to have a consistent supply, and that’s what we were looking for long-term, was a consistent infield mix that a school or an organization could get from us and know that from one year to the next that they were dealing with basically the same material. As time has gone on and our customers and our coaches and field managers have understood that there’s different things that go into this besides just going out in the field with a tractor. We’ve learned a lot and we’ve tried to educate our customers to the point now where we can, through our blending process that we have, there’s very few other people that are doing the blending that we have done here when we were Southern Athletic Fields, and we continue to do them now with Line to Line. So year after year after year, we can have exactly the same percentages,