The Sports Turf Managers Association honored TCU and Sports Field Manager Andrew Siegel with a pair of 2021 Field of the Year awards. Moncrief Field at Amon G. Carter Stadium took top honors for football and the Garvey-Rosenthal Field won in the soccer category. Both are natural grass surfaces.
The annual awards spotlight individuals and programs excelling in providing quality, safe playing surfaces at the professional, collegiate, K-12 school and parks and recreation levels. TCU was the only Texas school recognized.
“The last year and a half have been the most stressful and yet rewarding of my career,”
Siegel said, noting the pandemic sparked schedule changes on top of schedule changes.
Normally two or three weeks, fall 2020 football camp was a full five weeks. Games were added and then canceled, leading to more practices than usual and a season that was extended by almost a month — including three games in December. The team manipulated the field with turf blankets to maintain the safest possible playing surface.
Winter storm Uri’s artic temperatures in February were followed by a very cool and wet spring, which meant Siegel and his team did not know how much Bermuda was lost to the storm until the middle of June. In addition, social distancing protocols made the Carter an ideal venue to host TCU’s spring concert. The stage stretched across Moncrief Field for a week of almost daily rain.
“We eventually were forced to sod areas due to winter kill and stage damage. The team did everything one could ask and had the Carter ready to go for Practice 1. We played four games in the first five weeks of the season, and the field performed as well as anyone could have possibly asked,” Siegel said.
Todd Waldvogel, associate vice chancellor of facilities and campus planning, said the university is proud of its fields and those who work so hard to keep them and all areas of campus a point of pride for TCU.
“The work by Andrew and his team and all of our facilities team is always impressive, but it is especially impressive these past couple of years,” said Waldvogel. “They have continued to respond to campus needs with excellence. We are delighted for TCU to receive recognition for some of these efforts.”
Maintaining pristine field conditions requires a combination of art and science, Siegel said.
“When mowing a cultivar as low as a half an inch and growing it on sand — while surrounded by three shade producing skyscrapers — there is quite a bit of chemistry, biology, botany and math involved,” he said, adding that his team members have bachelor’s degrees in agronomy or turfgrass science.
Moncrief Field’s artificial turf was replaced with natural grass prior to the 1992 football season. In 2003, the field was renamed after W.A. “Monty & Tex” Moncrief following a $3 million donation to the football program in honor of the legendary oil family and one of the first families of philanthropy in Texas.
The home field of the TCU women’s soccer team, the Garvey-Rosenthal Soccer Stadium was completed prior to the start of the 2000 soccer season.
Although many universities have moved to synthetic plastics, both TCU fields are natural grass playing surfaces.
“Our goal as the sports turf management team is to provide the absolute safest surface we can to any athlete playing on them,” Siegel said. “We also take pride in the fact that our green spaces provide much needed oxygen for the environment and help cool surface temperatures.”
STMA award winners receive a trophy and complimentary registration to the annual STMA conference and will be highlighted in an upcoming issue of SportsField Management magazine.
“None of this would have been possible without the relentless effort of our sports turf team,” Siegel said. “They really are what makes this thing go day to day.”