My name is Kody Brooks I am a groundskeeper at the College of
Wooster. College of Wooster, we are a division 3 athletic school, so we have
six athletic fields we mow and maintain throughout the year with the ventrac.
We've been using that now for two years and it's made life a lot easier being
the mower being faster. More efficient with fuel less compaction and wear on
all of our fields. Standards are set high here. I mean this is very prestigious
school and I think a lot of people take a lot of pride in it especially for game
days you know they want the best looking field they could possibly have. Generally
we mow them about three times a week. Sometimes two depending on weather
conditions and if there are varsity games and they're generally mowed or every
game. So all six fields that takes us about
three to probably four hours. We used to use a nine-foot flex deck mower and now
since we've been using the wide area mower we've saved about an hour half two
hours of time. The speed you can mow is faster. We are a mowing at around seven
to eight miles an hour on athletic fields. Wide area mowers in the past it's
mowing speed is only three and a half miles per hour so this is over twice as
fast mowing speed.
This is our third season at the College of Wooster and the amount of dead areas
and compaction that we used to have especially around the edge of the fields
in the corners where I used to turn a lot. The areas have recovered being a
lot lighter tractor and articulating definitely helps with compaction and
turning and not tear up so much turf.
This ventrac is much easier to get on and off of since it's much closer to the
ground there's debris on the field if there's baseballs left on the field a
lot of different things so being able to you know an office definitely an added
bonus. I've chopped those up before.
It's important to keep colleges nice because the expectations of
faculty, staff, administration's, all of our athletics, everyone expects very nice
grounds. We thrive to be attractive for incoming students. Our athletic teams
expect good playing fields good conditions and so we just try to keep
everything as nice as we can and try to impress people.