Atlee High School students won a groundskeeping competition with this 24-by-150-foot flag design.
For the second year in a row, students in the Turf Science Program at Atlee High School in Mechanicsville have won the Sports Field Management Association’s Stars and Stripes contest. They beat 25 other teams, including the groundskeepers for Minor League Baseball’s Portland Sea Dogs of Maine, with a 24-foot-wide by 150-foot-long checkerboard flag.
Agriculture teacher Marc Moran, who has led the program for more than 20 years, says the 50 to 60 turf science students brainstormed the design last year as part of a patriotic theme for a football game. “By tradition, we try not to duplicate an endzone design, so the challenge for the students is to come up with something new and innovative,” he says.
Led by the program’s second-year students, the team spent three days laying out the design, painting the required field markings and filling in the flag, using layers of paint and stencils to ensure crisp corners on the stars. “The things we do are based directly on what sports field managers do at the professional level,” says Moran, noting that the technique was learned years ago from an assistant sports field manager working for the Denver Broncos.
Students in the two-course turf science sequence — part of Atlee’s Agriculture Education Program — learn turfgrass establishment and maintenance, soil science, irrigation design and other related topics and put it into practice caring for the high school’s eight athletic fields and helping manage the four fields at Chickahominy Middle School. Alumni have gone on to careers in sports turf and golf course management. Moran notes that several students have worked or interned at PGA golf courses, NCAA sports programs and Major League Baseball.
Moran is proud that this is the sixth national award for Atlee field management students. “The students take a lot of ownership in what we do, and their hard work is what makes the fields what they are,” he says. “Those achievements are a direct reflection of their work ethic and professionalism.”
