The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Area grounds keepers adjust after quiet spring
For the first time in 13years as a maintenance worker for LaGrange, Melissa Lilley experienced a lonely spring.
For the first time in her 13 years as a maintenance worker for the Village of LaGrange, Melissa Lilley had a lonely spring.
Normally, Lilley spends her almost all of the springtime at LaGrange Community Park, where she serves as the main grounds keeper for the park’s five softball fields.
And while Lilley still spent most of this past spring tending to the fields, it was different.
With the OHSAA cancelling the spring sports season because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the fields at LaGrange Community Park, like so many other fields throughout the area, essentially went untouched during the spring, meaning Lilley had to change her grounds keeping routine.
“We had nobody on the field to keep the weeds down. The infield was filled with grass and weeds,” she said. “It was hard. It was a lot of work.”
Lilley also had to deal with a different work schedule as well, as she only worked every other week during the pandemic.
“For my week I was at the park, but I was also other places in the village, and then when it wasn’t my week to work there was no one here,” she said. “It kind of got out of control there.”
Much like Lilley, Kelly Quinn’s spring was defined by change.
Quinn, the operations supervisor for Elyria City Schools, is part of a team in charge of the upkeep of Elyria’s two baseball fields, two softball fields and four soccer and football practice fields.
“It’s just nice to see the park alive again. It was like no man’s land.” Melissa Lilley, LaGrange Township maintenance worker
In a normal spring, Quinn and his team are out cutting and trimming the grass on the softball and baseball fields and repainting the foul and batter’s box lines.
While they still did those tasks this spring, the amount of time they spent on the fields went down.
“We still maintained the fields and preformed the aeration along with weed control and some trimming and mowing. The frequency just went down,” he said. “The biggest difference was there was less need to need to groom the infields of the ball fields as frequently because they weren’t in use.”
From late March to the end of April, Quinn’s team operated as skeleton crew focusing on doing basic maintenance of Elyria’s buildings and facilities. Once May rolled around, however, the team’s numbers bumped back up to where they normally were, which, combined with the lack of sports, meant they could get a jump start on some larger projects.
“The downtime did afford us the opportunity to address a few items around the fields that we hadn’t been able to do as frequently in the past, with the biggest being the completion of the installation of a new JV softball field,” Quinn said. “I believe they would’ve happened (in a normal spring), but it would have put a significantly higher strain on our maintenance team.”
The Lorain School District also changed its maintenance routine during the pandemic, as it’s been operating with a minimal “mission essential staff,” which includes six crew members maintaining all of the grass at the district’s baseball and softball fields.
“Since our primary fields are turf, we’ve been focusing on other areas for our students, such as resurfacing the track at George Daniels Field. But this has been quite a year,” Lorain Associate Director of Operations Kevin Haupt said. “When COVID-19 hit, we sat down with our team and developed a detailed crisis response plan so that we can swiftly enact protocols in the event of a future closure. In our world, it’s all about taking care of our people, so that they can be prepared to take care of others. If we get that right, we’ve done our job.”
While maintenance teams are beginning to return to normal operations, they’re doing so with new social distancing guidelines in play, something Quinn says hasn’t been a huge change for them due to the inherent distancing in maintenance.
“The only change really has been the need to utilize additional vehicles and the cleaning and sanitization of shared equipment like mowers or vehicles,” he said.
As someone who mostly works alone, Lilley also said she hasn’t had to change much about her routine.
“When people come to practice and play it’s such a wide area, we’re not really near each other,” she said. “If I’m talking to any of the coaches or anyone comes up to me, I make sure to stay six feet away from them. We sanitize and spray everything down.”
In many ways, Lilley’s spring officially started last weekend when more than 40 travel softball teams spent the weekend playing in a state qualifier tournament at the fields at LaGrange Community Park.
While June featured a slow uptick in games, nothing had compared to the chaos of that tournament.
And Lilley loved every second of it.
“I worked the fields at night to prep the fields for the next day,” she said. “It was a lot of work, but it was worth it to get to see everyone play. It’s just nice to see the park alive again. It was like no man’s land.”