Virginia Turfgrass Journal – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
The Turf Zone: Welcome to the Turf Zone. In this episode of Virginia Turfgrass, I’m talking to Marc Moran, CSFM and Agricultural and horticultural instructor at Atlee Hight School. Marc, thank you for joining me.
TTZ: We’re talking because Virginia Turfgrass Council is doing a focus on education programs and you lead the turfgrass course at Atlee Hight School. So let’s just start and talk about what that program looks like and how it got started.
MM: So it’s a two-year turf science course. We’ve been in place as an official program, course-wise since 2001-2002. In 2000-2001, I was part of a multi-teacher department and we were going through some proposed changes in our county, we were moving away from production agriculture and trying to get an idea of where our community wanted us to be. We’re still a strong agricultural county, but our school system was trying to move the focus from production to more of a modern agricultural model, so in that year that was going on we were talking about changes, but we hadn’t really decided on what was going to happen. I had taken on a, I was teaching landscape design construction, landscape contracting and I was looking for some outside projects and also we had gone through a coaching change in our football program. One of our assistants took over for our longtime head coach, who had retired. And one of the responsibilities of our coaching staff at the time was to manage their athletic facilities and that was across all sports. And this particular coach didn’t really have a strong background and he was like, “I need some help.” I have an undergraduate degree in Agriculture Education and also Horticulture, and some previous experience through my work with Southern States, and at home in our farm community. So I kind of tied back to a lot of those things and I said I would try to do my best to help him. Most of my experience through Southern States was with corn, wheat and soybeans, and I said, “We should be able to figure it out.” So we went through that discussion and in the meantime I was looking for more projects for my students to work on and we were focused on land measurement. I wanted to venture into surveying a little bit, teach kids how to use surveying instruments and autolevels and transits and things like that. I kind of created a lesson where we plotted points on our playing surface of the football field. And they didn’t realize it at the time, but the points I had plotted were our athletics logo. So “A” and swords, like you would see at University of Virginia. So this “A” and crossed sabres look. So I’d plotted those points, I had an alum who was really sharp in autoCAD, so I laid it out on paper and then we just did angles and distances and things like that, did a little bit of trig with the kids. When we plotted them, they were just a bunch of flags on the fields, then some of the kids started to realize it was our logo. So once we had the logo laid out we went ahead and outlined it, painted it. So it became our first ever sports turf project was our school logo on the 50-yard line at homecoming. And then we really got into it and the next thing you know, its like, “Can you checkerboard our end zones?” Sure, we can figure out how to do that and we were using backpack sprayers to paint, we had no technology at all, and no knowledge. We just made it up as we went. So then my experience with the sports turf, and I got approached by our boosters and, “We like what you did so far, and can you help out a little bit more?” They never really had an agronomy plan and we basically had our coaches put down whatever a sales person who they worked with over time, you know they trusted them. You know, they should have, they didn’t give them bad advice, but they never had a plan. It was always, they got to this date, we do this… there was no long-term plan of how to build an agronomy type ...