Cover Story

Education Spotlight on Atlee High School Turf Management with Marc Moran

Our series highlighting turfgrass programs in Virginia high schools wouldn’t be complete without a feature of Atlee High and Marc Moran. The original high school program in Virginia, Atlee paved a path for other schools to follow, and Marc’s steadfast efforts to establish state curriculum and grow a sustainable program have been well recognized locally and nationally.

We talked to Marc about everything from the inception of the programming to surviving the unique challenges the 2020/21 year presented in the wake of COVID.

Virginia Turfgrass Journal: How did the Atlee High Turf Program get started and what does it consist of?

Marc Moran: It’s a two-year turf science course. We’ve been in place as an official program, since 2001–2002. In 2000–2001, I was part of a multi-teacher department, and we were going through some proposed changes in our county, we were moving away from production agriculture and trying to get an idea of where our community wanted us to be. I was teaching landscape design construction, landscape contracting, and I was looking for some outside projects. One of our assistants took over for our longtime head football coach, who had retired. And one of the responsibilities of our coaching staff at the time was to manage their athletic facilities and that was across all sports. This particular coach didn’t really have a strong background and asked for help. I have an undergraduate degree in Agriculture Education and also Horticulture, and some previous experience through my work with Southern States, and at home in our farm community. So I tied back to a lot of those things and I said I would try to do my best to help him.

I was looking for more projects for my students to work on and we were focused on land measurement. I created a lesson where we plotted points on our playing surface of the football field. The points I had plotted were our athletics logo. Once we had the logo laid out we went ahead and outlined it, painted it. It became our first ever sports turf project — our school logo on the 50-yard line at homecoming.

Then I was approached by our boosters and, “We like what you did so far, and can you help out a little bit more?” There was no long-term plan of how to build an agronomy-type situation. So I drew back on what I had experience with when I was an undergraduate and I worked at Southern States working with customers building plans for their lawns and also for their gardens and expanded on that. My college experience in coursework for greenhouse planting, you were on a calendar and we built things based on water sampling and other elements, so it made sense to me to start building some sort of system that we could use.

We really had a strong 2000–01. At that time, we started having curriculum meetings with the county and they decided that in 2001–02, they would like to pull out our agriculture production courses and our business courses and implement a turf science program. So myself and two other teachers in the county sat down with our vocational director and we wrote an initial two-year coursework competency outline. It went really well in 01–02, we had strong enrollment. I kind of started a program, I started coaching in 00-01, I had a spectrum of kids from the kid that was almost the valedictorian to the kid with a 4th grade math ability, but they all worked really well together because they all had a work ethic. I felt like at the end of the day I could trust them. Because in that environment, we knew we were going to be working with equipment, pesticides, fertilizers. That’s where we wanted to make sure we really covered all our bases and I wanted to find the right kids. So I hand-picked my first group. They held a very high standard among themselves and they held a high standard as a program. They really bought into what we did. And we took the same logo from the year before. We redid it, made it better. We started an overseeding program that we never had before to the level that we wanted to. All that just fell into place, so by the time the first year was over, I was approached by the State Department of Education, there was a lot of interest in this. So myself and the other two teachers reframed our curriculum we wrote in the first year to meet the State standard framework. The State adopted the program and since then, it’s been a two-year course sequence.

VTJ: After being an established program for so long, how did you adjust to the changes and challenges the 2020-21 school year brought with COVID-related restrictions and sports season shifts?

MM: We’re no different than any other school who’s had to run sports. We closed school around March 16th of 2020. We don’t know if we’re going back in two weeks, so we need to be prepared. At the time, most of our spring sports teams had played one scrimmage and we weren’t sure when we came back from spring break if we were going to be in school. We were preparing the whole time as if we were, and then of course when we got back from spring break it wasn’t long after that they told us that we were going to be closed the rest of the year.

When the principal told us they didn’t want anyone here, the first thing we did was reach out to the school system. These facilities, you just can’t turn the lights off and walk out the door, it’s got to be maintained. We figured out what protocols we needed to follow in order to be safe. That was the first thing was working with school board administration on exactly what we could do. Then we spent the whole summer not knowing.

Once we knew the school year was over, we went ahead the first of April or so and basically transitioned all of our overseeded fields back to pure Bermuda and then just said we’ll have a super grow-in year. We started our grow-in for the fall not knowing what was going to happen in the fall in late-April, early May and started to build the stadium and all of the game facilities and practice facilities. We got our sprigging, just prepared as if we were going to be playing sports. As we got closer to the month of August, it was apparent that wasn’t going to happen. As a school system, we shifted from an A/B Block to a 4x4 system. So I had a semester of only four classes, we met every day. Then the second semester we’d have a new group of four classes that meet every day. That was a big challenge for us because we were used to having alternating courses, so certain classes would do things on certain days and that all went out the window. We had the same kids every day for five days.

September 8th or so we were full tilt in-person. Lots of protocols in place – mask wearing, cleaning we had to do meet the requirements for the state of Virginia Health Department. With all that going on, we knew we weren’t having fall sports, but we still had a facility we had to manage, so we spent a lot of time in the fall doing all of our seeding applications, fertilizer applications, cleanups, whatever we needed for pesticides and we still carried class out as if we were having fall season, we just didn’t do a lot of heavy field work. We still managed our fields, we just didn’t mark anything, we didn’t paint anything.

We knew going into October that we were going to have some sort of fall sports season and it wasn’t outlined really strongly yet, but we were going to do something in the winter. We’re going to be putting traffic on a field that’s dormant when we’re on it, never been dormant playing on it and all the sudden we’re going to play on that field and it had to survive all of a fall season, and then all of a spring season. We’re going to prepare for field hockey and football on our fields and somehow maintain cover. One of the challenges with our coaches was we had to say we have developed a very effective traffic plan because that’s a big thing that I’ve always focused on because it doesn’t cost us any money to manage traffic. We just tell coaches to rotate, put a cone out versus painting a line, anything we can to be creative in how we coach, that will same us a tremendous amount of resources and keep then field playable for not just your season, now we have to look to another season after you.

We really committed on our game facilities to a heavy overseeding program, so we could manage traffic on stadiums pretty effectively. We could keep out stadiums under close watch. What we couldn’t do was really give the attention to the practice facilities, so we really had to rely on coaches to be very disciplined in how they practice. We tried to do the things we could to make some out of play areas playable so they could carry out things to reduce traffic. It wasn’t always perfect, I would get heartburn at night looking at things, but also I couldn’t tell a coach not to coach either, so it’s a balancing act of what can you do and being able to find the fine line of let’s make this choice where we’re at. Even the Athletic Administration had to decide, tonight’s not going to be a good night to play, what would be a good time? So we had to move some games around, maybe cancel, and all that kind of stuff because we knew because of the dormant nature of the bermudagrass fields, if we did a lot of damage, we weren’t going to recover for spring.

We covered things up when we had to, we put blankets out when we had to, we had rules in place for games that you couldn’t warm up… in soccer and lacrosse we asked our visiting teams and home team not to use the game creases and the game goal areas to pregame. We would slide the goal over 10 feet and we’d say pregame here and when the game starts, we’ll slide the goal back over to the crease. You wouldn’t think that mattered, but if you slid it yesterday 10 feet to the left and then the next game 10 feet to the right, we could spread traffic out over a long period of time. This was the first year I haven’t had the resources to resprig and resod goal mouths. We learned new ways to do things, so it’s forced us to be creative so I’m thankful for that. I only had seven kids that could get their electives, so I managed an entire football season with seven kids, an entire soccer season and lacrosse season and field hockey season with seven kids. But if I could’ve picked seven kids, I’m glad I picked those seven. Because we didn’t have a lazy one in the bunch, they all knew exactly what to do.

VTJ: Now that you’ve survived those extra challenges and come out on the other side better, what are your goals for the program going forward?

MM:Thinking about the environmental side of things, I think we do things really well, we’re pretty responsible, but we’re looking down that road to submit ourselves as an environmental stewardship program. We’ve pulled the application out for the STMA Environmental Facility. It’s important to me because it once again paints our program in the light that it should be painted, that we are very responsible about what we do and how we do it. We’re not being reckless with our nutrients, with our pesticides. We’re trying to be very conscious about the environment overall, water quality being a big thing.

That’s a goal for us in the next year to two, to have that plaque on the wall. I constantly look for ways to get kids recognition. One of the biggest things that we’ve been able to do through support of the county is to develop our Twitter account and our social media presence because the kids are working hard and they’re doing things—and I’ll say that there are programs all around our community that are turf programs.

One of the things that we want to see, and the thing that Dr. Sandor and Dr. Goatley at Tech have been really big on, we’re trying to open up to more youth. And it’s not just a program like mine that has a program, but with FFA opportunities, kids and contests. There’s a career development event that Dr. Goatley, myself and several other people have been trying for a long time to get going at the national FFA, but we learned from them that they want to see them started grassroots. We’ve worked with a lot of states to get a state FFA career development event contest for kids to do at Virginia Tech in the summertime. We had one two years ago, and of course COVID threw a monkey wrench into last summer, but we participated in that.

I think that was one of those things that for Virginia Tech, it was an eye-opening experience because there were a lot of kids and it’s not just kids in my program, there’s kids maybe at other schools that may not have a turfgrass program but kids that are interested in this kind of stuff. They may be avid golfers, maybe running a pick-up truck start-up operation and want to be longterm professional lawn care guys, their interest in turf is just as strong as my kids’. So get kids opportunities to participate and recognized for achievement, I think that’s important. I’d like to see more of my kids end up at Virginia Tech, or any other program across the country that offers turf science. I’m awful proud of all of my alumni that are in the industry today. I was proud to have kids, I had a kid that did an internship at the Padres, one did an internship at the Miami Marlins, kids on PGA courses that were in US Open. I still have kids who now have home lawns that call us and say, “I remember doing this in class, am I doing this right?” and start sending pictures. Next you know, they’re striping their front yard a certain way.

I’ve got some alumni that have done super well in the local lawn care business and I still call on them now because they have technology I don’t have. I tell them sometimes, I have to go out and do internships somewhere in the summertime, so let me know if you need help. I’ve worked for some of them – you’re the boss, whatever you tell me to do, I do it.

Long-term, we just want to continue to be relevant, and I think with the things that are happening in the industry today there’s a lot of opportunity for our kids to help paint the industry in the light that it should be painted in.

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