'All gas, no brake’

When the Horry Georgetown Technical College Turf Bowl team took the stage in the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, all eyes were on the trophy. “All gas. No brake. Get in there and just dominate,” says Bryson Hardin, a second-year turf student at Horry Georgetown.

For the fifth year in a row, the student academic team raised the Turf Bowl trophy at the Carolinas GCSA Conference and Trade Show. 

Hardin prepped Mondays and Wednesdays alongside teammates Grayson Long, Lane Roberts, Max Fieber and the rest of a large and impressive crew. The Fighting Mole Crickets fielded two teams of four, with Hardin and company winning and the B team finishing third overall. Clemson University’s B team finished second, a year after splitting the championship with Horry Georgetown in a historic tie.

The two HGTC teams prepared for the competition together. “When it was both of us sitting down right here, we started having some fun,” Hardin says. “We got together, and we do what we do every Monday. We come in and we study. It was a normal study session going against each other.”

The Mole Crickets’ A team set the tone early, winning their preliminary round with 2,200 points by correctly answering nine of 11 questions and topping the A teams from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (1,400 points,) Clemson (500) and NC State (-900).

HGTC’s B team, meanwhile, won its preliminary round with 2,600 points, edging NC State’s C team (2,000) and the Abraham Baldwin (600) and Sandhills Community College (400) B teams. Clemson’s B team won the other preliminary with 1,400 points, ahead of NC State’s B team (1,000) and the Central Piedmont Community College (700) and Sandhills (-100) A teams.

Support for the HGTC team crackled throughout the ballroom, as students, professors and alums filled in seats and hovered in the back for the championship. No matter the subject matter — Plant Nutrition & Fertilizers, Soil Organisms, Turfgrass Diseases, on and on — the Mole Crickets were locked in. 

One word to describe the afternoon? 

“Legacy,” Fieber says. “We have a legacy.” 

And while this fifth straight win only further cemented the Mole Crickets’ legacy, it might be the last Turf Bowl scheduled for the relative anonymity of the back ballrooms.

Late during the championship round, longtime host Bo Barefoot mentioned that he would love to shine a brighter light on the students by moving the championship round to a 20- to 30-minute slot during the general session.

“Don’t you think that’d be cool?” Barefoot asked rhetorically. “Just do one. Let ’em scream and holler and see the kids enjoy it. I loved when they were cheering. My goal is to get them in front of the decision makers. Now they had a great time and they loved it, but to be in front of ten times as many people — that makes my heart patter, much less theirs.”

What would it take to move the Turf Bowl from its normal Tuesday afternoon spot to Wednesday morning in front of a considerably larger audience? It just has to wind up on the committee discussion docket — where it’s already been penciled in, according to Carolinas GCSA executive director Tim Kreger. 

“That’s how ideas move forward,” Kreger says. “We take ideas from all over the place and we see how they stick.” And now is as good a time as any to at least talk about it. 

“Oh, yeah,” Kreger says. “Why wait? I think it’s a great idea.”

Heck, if you’re a Carolinas turf pro, you might wind up earning some education points next year by watching students trying to further their own education: Kreger has already encouraged the Turf Bowl writers to incorporate “a lot of questions that would require pesticide answers so we can apply pesticide points and have more people sign up for the session and have a bigger audience.”

That could give the event a whole different sort of legacy.

Kelsie Horner is Golf Course Industry’s assistant editor. Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.