Blue Wahoos Stadium Field Growing Green Again With Ryegrass

The field at Blue Wahoos Stadium is currently going through a transformation to restore its luster.
"The end goal is to make it nice and green again," said Dustin Hannah, the Blue Wahoos head groundskeeper.
Starting days before Thanksgiving, Hannah and assistant groundskeeper Christian Bloesl used a procedure that involved aerification, then seeding the entire field area with ryegrass - a turf grass that thrives under cooler temperatures with moisture and sunlight.
"I hope by the first week of December, we'll see results," said Hannah, as he prepared that week for the field makeover.
It happened. The ryegrass began to come through.
With continual irrigation and care, the former bermudagrass strand is being replaced with the thinner, longer ryegrass. The overall effect is a much greener hue to the entire playing field.
After the Dec. 13 Subway High School All-Star Football game at the stadium, which was played in rainy conditions, the field has been redressed again this week and should benefit from the favorable weather forecast next week.
The football bleachers in the outfield, along with the goalposts, will be removed after Christmas. The infield area, home plate and the pitcher's mound will be restored in January.
Hannah said any replacement sod needed will be ryegrass to keep it consistent. The first baseball games in 2020 will be the inaugural Wahoos Classic on Feb. 12-14 featuring Oklahoma vs. Virginia in a three-game series.
The new event occurs on the opening weekend of the NCAA Division I college baseball season. In March, the Cox Diamond Invitational, sponsored by Pensacola Sports, on March 6-8 begins a busy month of collegiate and area high school games prior to the start of the Blue Wahoos home schedule in April.
"It's a pretty big deal, a huge commitment," Hannah said. "We decided to make the field look even better at that time of year when Oklahoma and Virginia play.
"Bermudagrass is not a fan of the cold weather. So we're doing our part here to hopefully make it look good. I'm hoping we'll have a really nice strand of ryegrass throughout the field in a couple weeks.
"What I would like is to keep this grass through the first week of our own (Blue) Wahoos season in April, then see where we are."
Eventually, Hannah said, the ryegrass will need to be killed out and have the summer climate bermudagrass back on the field. This is the same kind of procedure used by the stadiums in south Florida which host spring training for major league teams.
In Fort Myers, for example, the Minnesota Twins' Hammond Stadium and the Boston Red Sox JetBlue Park overseed with ryegrass to have the fields in optimum condition for spring training and the Grapefruit League games in February and March.
"The last time I over-seeded anything was when I worked three years ago in south Florida," said Hannah, a Crestview native, whose experience includes working at Roger Dean Stadium and training complex - a facility shared by the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins for spring training. 
"You always get that anxious feeling when you get ready for something like this, but it does take time," he said.
The process included watering zones of the field every six minutes following the aerification.
"We did what's called a solid-time aerification to break up the compaction from football and baseball, along with all the dryness we had in September," Hannah said. "We use buckets on the mower to clean up excess grass clippings.
"Just by doing that, you're going to get better seed contact to the ground. Better coverage throughout the field. What you want is that really, nice, carpet look."
The field at Blue Wahoos Stadium was challenged throughout 2019 by a variety of unpreventable circumstances. In June, lightning struck the water pump station outside the ballpark, resulting in the inability to utilize an irrigation system for weeks.
In late-August, the water pump system was again shut down from a equipment part failure. It coincided with the start of a six-week drought in the Northwest Florida area with little rainfall until mid-October.
By Oct. 10, the area was 12.6 inches under normal rainfall, according to the National Weather Service. Zero rain occurred the entire month of September.
"This year has been one for the record books," Hannah said. "I never had anything like this happen before. Through all of that, the field has actually done very well. We are fortunate in that regard.
"But what we're hoping now is that the field will look great for the events we have coming up and the baseball games we have planned in February and March before our own season begins