Changeup

Three summers ago, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic paused the world, a small contingent of turf professionals considered a future without sports. Most of them worked for minor league baseball teams, whose 2020 season disappeared before it started — along with chunks of their salary. Others worked for colleges or parks and recreation departments.

As March gave way to June gave way to December, some picked up second or third jobs. One minor league baseball groundskeeper in Michigan plowed snow until the 1 a.m. calls all but shut down his body. Other turf pros shifted their professional gears to farm work. At least one dived into soil research.

And some followed through on an idea birthed during that spring and summer without so many sports: They moved from sports fields to golf courses. Oddly enough, others moved the opposite direction, from golf courses to sports fields or local parks. No two paths were exactly the same and when you dig in — like a golf course maintenance team installing new irrigation or a baseball grounds crew rebuilding a mound— neither were the motives.

CURIOSITY

Kody Tingler kicked off the pandemic in what sure looked like a perfect position for a 27-year-old turf pro.

Less than five years out of Virginia Tech, Tingler had already logged a year each as the assistant director of grounds management for the Double-A Richmond Flying Squirrels and as a fields coordinator back in Blacksburg at his alma mater before he landed with D.C United as perhaps the youngest head groundskeeper in Major League Soccer.

Unlike most MLS clubs, D.C. United contracted out its field maintenance, so Tingler worked for an external company that also tasked him with a variety of outside projects, including high school renovations.

That all ended when MLS suspended its season and the company released Tingler. He remained unemployed for much of that first pandemic summer. He wanted to return to Richmond to be closer to his girlfriend, and when he did move back, he spotted a new opportunity.

“Sports were dead and golf was the only thing that was thriving,” Tingler says. “I reached out to two golf courses” — one of them The Federal Club, a private club in Glen Allen, Virginia, that hired him as an assistant superintendent. He clicked almost immediately with superintendent Matt Drayton.

“It was a good opportunity to try something different, get my feet wet in golf, and see if I liked it and if I wanted to go that route or stick with sports,” he says. “Plus, I hadn’t had much cool-weather (experience) other than rye or fescue, and this was all bentgrass, so I saw that as another opportunity to broaden my horizons.”

Tingler worked with Drayton for two seasons, learning the differences between three acres and 100 acres, brushing up on the Spanish necessary for communicating with a largely Latino crew, and falling for a part of the industry he had never considered before 2020.

“I moved because I saw golf was thriving and I know a lot of turf people were in the same boat I was — they got laid off during the pandemic because there were no sports, there were no jobs,” Tingler says. “Yes, the grass is still growing but the owners can’t afford to pay you. I was kind of surprised more people didn’t make the jump, because it looks like golf can survive anything.”

Tingler ultimately moved back to sports fields — he is currently a ball fields supervisor for Henrico County, which includes Richmond, managing five crew members and 20 parks — around the time Drayton also moved away from golf.

“Golf is a different animal,” Tingler says. “You’re not watching the sports, you’re just constantly working. I loved it, loved all the guys — I just didn’t love pulling hose every day.”

LOVE

Tyler Lenz landed his first golf course maintenance job when he was just 15 years old.

He landed his second when he was 30.

In between, Lenz — currently the assistant superintendent at Metairie Country Club, a 1922 Seth Raynor design in the New Orleans suburbs — worked all baseball all the time. Fifteen years, nothing but diamonds.

He started his baseball career when he was 8 and his uncle, Craig Veeder, the longtime groundskeeper for the old independent Bridgeport Bluefish, invited him onto the field before a game at Herschel Greer Stadium in Nashville. “And it was over,” Lenz says. “Astronaut, firefighter, those could go fly a kite. I was going to be a groundskeeper.” And he was. First at Bailey Park Baseball Facility near his childhood home, then with the Low-A West Michigan Whitecaps, the Texas Rangers, Florida Atlantic University, the Flying Squirrels, the Low-A Bowling Green Hot Rods and the Double-A Midland RockHounds — his first two head gigs, the first of which he got a day before turning 24 — then Texas Christian University and the Atlanta Braves.

By the time he reached Major League Baseball, though, he was no longer single. And after two years with the Braves, he and his girlfriend-turned-fiancée-turned-bride, Caitlin, weighed whether to move closer to his family in Michigan, her family in Louisiana, or remain in Georgia.

There was no real choice: “The cardinal rule if you marry a woman from south Louisiana,” Lenz says with a laugh, “you will 100 percent move to south Louisiana.”

He worked one more baseball job, this time at Louisiana State University. But Caitlin, who recently earned her DDS, wanted to run her own dental practice and one opened up in Norco, about half an hour west of New Orleans. She had already followed him to Georgia. Now it was his turn to follow her. But without baseball connections in the Big Easy, what was the next job?

Golf, of course. Lenz has played most of his life and currently customizes clubs for friends and family, and the bug bit him hard during his Braves run, when he would sneak up to Sweetens Cove on plenty of off days. An assistant position opened at MCC within weeks of the Lenzes moving to the area, and Lenz applied with an email: “Hi, I’m interested in the position. I’ve been in baseball for 14 years and the last time I worked in golf I was 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. But I know grass.”

Almost a year later, Lenz is as comfortable with golf as if he had never left it during high school.

“It was a decision I had to put a lot of thought into,” he says. “You do something for so long and you’re pretty good at it and then you flip the table and start over at 30 years old, it was a little scary. But I’m a sponge. Teach me how to do it and I’ll refine what you teach me. I wasn’t too proud to say I don’t know.

“You watch, you learn, you listen, and you kind of pick up the cadence of how they manage things.”

CHALLENGE

The pandemic foisted one unique challenge after another, and the Class of 2020 received a big one. On the brink of graduation, they needed to adapt immediately to virtual classes.

Wil Lannon was finishing up his undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech during the spring of 2020, with parts of two semesters remaining; a switch from the two-year program to the four-year program extended his time in Blacksburg by about six months. He attended all spring classes online, then returned to campus in the fall — but only after his fourth turf internship, this one with the Country Club of Fairfax in Virginia.

After 2017 and 2018 internships with the Washington Nationals and the Texas Rangers, Lannon figured he was on a baseball path — or at least a sports field path — but he wound up at Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in 2019, which he describes as “a change, but interesting.”

When his internship at Fairfax expanded to a full-time position as assistant superintendent, he grabbed the opportunity.

“Since it was my first golf job, I went into it like I went into my first internship with the Nationals,” Lannon says. “I knew stuff, but it was a whole new game. Learn as much as I could. It was nice going from baseball, where everybody is working on top of each other on two or three acres to being spread out over 100, 150 acres.”

Lannon figured he would return to a baseball field after his first year, but he stuck around for a second year, then a third year. He moonlighted each of the last two summers as a member of the tarp crew for the Flying Squirrels — an extracurricular he will avoid this year thanks to a new position: assistant superintendent at the Country Club of Virginia, a 54-hole private club in Richmond where Lannon shares James River Course assistant duties with two other Hokies, Ryan Thompson and Brad Vandygriff.

Because Lannon is so young, barely 25, and already has multiple years of both golf and baseball on his resume, he remains uncertain which way he will swing for the long term. Switch-hitting might work, though.

“I do kind of like the idea of going back and forth, and taking what I learned from one to the other,” he says. “Though it does seem like golf courses have all the money.”

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Has any turf pro worked in as many different corners of the industry since the start of the pandemic as Tradd Jones?

In March 2020, Jones was still the head groundskeeper for the Low-A Bowling Green Hot Rods in Kentucky. When Major League Baseball cancelled their season, he moved to the Thornblade Club, a private club outside Greenville, South Carolina, where he worked a year as assistant superintendent. Forever a baseball fan — especially of the Braves — he jumped at the opportunity to move closer to home and maintain Russ Chandler Stadium at Georgia Tech, and he added maintenance duties at the school’s Noonan Golf Facility after the assistant there retired. And then, last September, he left one dream job for another to join the team at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, prepping the field for the Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United, the SEC Championship Game, a variety of other games and matches for “both forms of football” and, in three years, some FIFA World Cup matches.

“Bigger stadium, brighter lights, bigger crowds,” Jones says. “I remember seeing an opening when I moved to Atlanta and I wasn’t interested at the time, just because I have a degree in grass” — the stadium switched last year from FieldTurf to CORE, a multi-layer, dual-polymer fiber — “but the longer I lived here and saw the Falcons on TV, United on TV, went to a couple concerts here, I noticed how nice the facility was. And one day the job just opened and I went for it, and now we’re here.”

Jones, 33, is a Horry Georgetown Technical College alum who worked on both golf courses and baseball fields during his time as a Fighting Mole Cricket, so he was already familiar with some of the similarities between sports, but he recently added a new overlap to his repertoire.

“The Stimpmeter,” he says. “Before a recent United match, we did some ball roll drills and it’s the exact same thing as the Stimpmeter, just with a bigger ramp and a bigger ball. You pick a point, you roll it one way. Move it to the left, roll it that way. Move it to the right, roll it that way. And there were maybe eight different spots on the pitch where we did that. It was the same process as on a golf course, but our (turf) is perfectly flat.”

Jones is thrilled with his new position — and again, those World Cup matches are a big draw — but if golf ever hooks him, Atlanta is packed with great courses.

“East Lake is right down the road, Chateau Elan is up there, Bobby Jones is right down the road,” he says. “It’s an amazing spot to be. There’s no shortage of opportunities here.”

THE TICK OF THE CLOCK

There are also no shortage of different paths to golf course maintenance. Rick Jones started his as an engineer, then a billiards hall owner, before starting work as an environmental cleaner with the Kansas City Chiefs when he was 41. Eight years later, he is an assistant superintendent at a 54-hole private golf community in Vero Beach, Florida. How the heck did that happen?

“If you don’t know something, don’t act like you know it,” says Jones, no relation to Tradd Jones. “Just ask questions and be persistent about it. And if you fail, get back up again until you succeed.”

Jones cleaned for the Chiefs for parts of three years before he backed into a spot on the turf team, jumping in on maintenance and climbing the ranks before adding responsibilities with the neighboring Royals. After close to a decade in Missouri, he moved for part of a year to Georgia Tech, then to the University of Arizona, before heading to Florida for a turf managerial role with ABM Industries. The lack of consistency with that position prompted him to look for something more stable — and that took him to John’s Island Club in Vero Beach, where he’s currently an assistant superintendent.

“I was scared to give up what I knew,” Jones says. “I can take care of a football field, I can take care of a baseball field. But now that I’m over here, I love it.

“In golf, you’re constantly learning. You have 18 different tee boxes, you have 18 different fairways, you have 18 different greens. You have multiple problems every day and you’re not going to see the same thing on every surface. And you have the opportunity to really cultivate and grow in turf.”

Jones’ old boss, Chiefs head groundskeeper Travis Hogan, proved years ago that the jump from one side of the turf industry to the other — and to do so incredibly successfully — is entirely possible. Hogan worked at Pebble Beach Golf Links and Spyglass Hill Golf Course before returning to Missouri to work as a superintendent at Sullivan Country Club and the wonderfully named Murder Rock Golf Club. Hogan moved back to the Chiefs in 2009, when he was in his early 30s.

Jones is only as old as he feels — and he doesn’t feel 49.

“If I had known about turf out of high school,” he says, “I would have been doing this a long time ago.”

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.