As fans enter the gates of Allie P. Reynolds Stadium and look at the playing surface, there is a lot of grass to maintain.

It’s not the average patch of grass from the front yard.

It’s 90,000 square feet of bermuda grass seeded with perennial rye grass.

For Todd Tribble and his staff of 16 workers, the playing surface at Allie P. Reynolds Stadium is one of their biggest priorities while maintaining the athletic fields at Oklahoma State.

            “Baseball is 75 to 80 percent of what we do,” Tribble said.

            Tribble, OSU’s athletic field superintendent, is in his 11^th year at OSU. Of his sixteen workers, eight are full-time staff and the others consist of student workers. His department manages the playing surfaces at Allie P. Reynolds stadium, Cowgirl Stadium, Neal Patterson Stadium and the track’s field event area’s and a new 100-acre cross country course.

            A typical day for the athletic grounds crew staff begins early in the morning about 8 and can stretch to as late as 11 p.m., depending on what events the crew has to staff.

            “We’ll start our day over at softball,” Tribble said. “A little less to manage, we’ll clean up the grass edges around the dirt and clean up the synthetic turf while also managing the moisture on the dirt. The same goes for baseball. We’ll check our areas and manage the moisture and then give the grass a mow. After that, we just set up for practice.”

            Game days are easier for Tribble’s staff but also present a longer work day.

“If it’s a 6:30 p.m. game, we are here by 8 a.m. and won’t leave until around 11 p.m. or until our post game work is done,” Tribble said. “We figure that (coach) Josh (Holliday) comes out four hours before first pitch to start the team’s pregame routine, so we are trying to get most of our work done before 2 p.m. It’s about an hour’s worth of post-game work to get cleaned up.”

The preparation for a game day is not something that is started the day before a game, but a few days in advance. Tribble and his staff decide on a field pattern for a game and begin to mow it.

            “We usually try to start setting a pattern three days before the fans will see it,” Tribble said. “The initial time the pattern begins to get cut in, the lines are not normally straight. As we get up to Friday first pitch, the lines have progressively come along. The more time it gets mowed, the brighter it gets and the easier it is for the operators to mow.”

            Tribble said the patterns in the outfield are normally a more traditional pattern, and he does not attempt to get too fancy with it.

            The mowers are equipped with rollers, which help give the mow pattern more definition.

            “Each mower has rollers,” Tribble said. “The roller is what presses the grass down. A light-colored stripe is mowed towards the wall from home plate. A dark colored stripe is mowed away from the wall towards the infield.”

            T the outfield grass is not the biggest time consumer for Tribble’s staff.

            Among with the detail of the grass and mow pattern, the clay areas on the field are the most worked on areas for the field.

            “All the dirt areas are the biggest time consumer,” Tribble said. We try to make sure they are not too wet or too dry and making sure our edges are crisp. We make sure there is enough conditioner on it and there are no low spots. The grass itself is pretty easy for us. It’s a day-to-day task as the clay is a three-to-four times a day task.”

            When it comes to maintaining an athletic field, Tribble encourages his workers to take pride in their work.

            “We try to maintain a high attention to detail, “Tribble said. “The small stuff is what makes the difference for us. We try to take no shortcuts and treat each day like it is a game day. We never know when someone is going to walk through our facility and judge whether we are good at our jobs or not based on how the field looks.”

            The attention to detail does not go unnoticed.

            Victor Romero, OSU baseball’s volunteer assistant coach, has spent all of his time either playing or coaching on a field maintained by Tribble while at OSU.

            Romero played catcher for OSU during the 2012-13 seasons. After a brief stint with the San Diego Padres, Romero returned back to OSU to begin coaching.

            He attributes the attention to detail to helping the players play on a good surface.

            “Those guys spend a lot of their time setting up and working on the field,” Romero said. “For ground ball work, not having choppy grass or an uneven dirt surface makes it the world of difference when we practice. It’s a top of the line condition.”

            When Tribble and his staff are not maintaining Allie P. Reynolds Stadium, they can be tending to other athletic facilities.

            This past fall, they inherited Neal Patterson Stadium, the new home of Cowgirl Soccer. The surface is the same grass as the baseball and softball fields, but has added a new field for the staff to upkeep.

            Adam Pope, the associate athletic field superintendent, said there are only a few issues that come along with the new soccer field.

            “I think the biggest thing is making sure areas do not get burnt out or overused,” Pope said. “Besides that, we just have to keep the field measured out and come paint lines when needed.”

            Along with Neal Patterson Stadium, Tribble and his staff are now beginning to inherit a new cross-country course. The land sits behind the Morrison housing community off of McElroy Road. It presents a challenge that his staff has not faced before.

            “With cross country, it is the additional acreage,” Tribble said. ”We have never had to maintain acreage of that matter. We spent a lot of money to be able to host NCAA regionals this year and NCAA championships next year. It’s a little bit of unknown for us with over 100 acres and it’s not completed yet. We are trying to figure out how to maintain that at a high level and will be interesting the first few years.”

            Along with all of their grass fields they maintain, Tribble says one of the biggest problems they face is rain.

            At Allie. P Reynolds Stadium, the field does not have the modern-day drainage such as the soccer stadium. Tribble said this is called a USGA type construction. The way it is constructed at Allie P. Reynolds Stadium is surface drainage.

            “When it comes to rain, it’s our biggest issue,” Tribble said. “If you have a field that is drained properly, it consists of a layer of sand that meets the natural soil. Underneath the sand sits gravel and four inches of drain pipe. So as it rains, the moisture sinks into the sand and gravel, making it drain faster. Here at Allie P., we have to drain it across the field. That’s called surface drainage, making the field a little more suspect to wet conditions.”

            But, with most of their time dedicated to Allie P. Reynolds Stadium, their effort does not go unnoticed by the OSU baseball players.

            Cade Cabbiness, a junior outfielder, said there have been times where Tribble has asked him to move spots in the outfield to avoid killing grass.

            “I like to play in a certain spot,” Cabbiness said. “After standing in that spot over and over, it can kill grass over time. Todd always asks me to move. At first, I was confused because it was my positioning, but looking at it now, it’s something they take pride in and they did not want another dead spot in the outfield.”

            With Romero, he has his own nickname though for the manicurists of the grass at Allie P. Reynolds Stadium.

            “I call them the barbers,” Romero said. “They trim up the lines, fade them up and make them pinpoint. It’s something they obviously take pride in.”