SHAUN M ER E D I T H MEM B E R SPO TL I G H T ON
P AR K A N D S A F E T Y D I V ISIO N CH I EF FO R CALVERT CO UN TY
What do you do in your current position for Calvert County? In the current position I have a really big scope of work. A lot of it has to do with athletic fields. We have over 60 total, some of them are local elementary and middle school fields we help maintain for the school district. We also have stuff ranging from highly maintained turf that has irrigation and bermudagrass or bluemuda, but the majority is not even irrigated. At that point, it’s just keeping it as green as you can. Per my title, for our department, I also see a lot of safety issues and I also manage all of our capital improvement projects for the Park and Recreation Department, which is about $32 million worth of projects. We have a pretty big staff as well — if we’re full staff, we’re up around 60 people. We work over 600 acres of land that doesn’t just have athletic fields. It’s everything from trails to tennis courts, basketball courts, skate parks, dog parks, you name it, so customer service gets involved in a lot of that too, with being a public facility. What was your career path prior to this position? My family had a landscape business, so I grew up in that field of work. When I was a kid, I remember being out there mowing grass with my grandfather and the natural progression of things led me into the turfgrass industry. I went to Penn State and got a turfgrass degree. I went in there with all intentions of working on golf courses. Freshman year of college, I got in a bad fourwheeler accident, broke my neck in four places and paralyzed my right arm. That had me thinking about whether it was the right career path anymore. Obviously it’s not a job where you get to sit behind a desk all the time. But I stuck with it, I had a lot of good support. People encouraged me to stay in this field of work and I’m glad for that. I wouldn’t be where I’m at without it. I started off going into baseball. I worked in minor league baseball for eight years, going from State College up to New Hampshire. Minor league baseball, as people probably know, is a lifestyle, I like to say, more than it is a job. You have to be fully invested and want to spend the majority of your time there
during the season. A lot of people do it, but my wife and I thought it was a good idea to try and look at a career change and find something that’s a little less hour-dependent, which led me into parks and recreation, where I am now. I honestly enjoy it a lot and I miss being on the grass all the time, but it keeps it fresh. Days go fast and really widen up the umbrella of knowledge. With such a diverse range of tasks in your current position, what’s the best part? Is it still the grass? Oh yeah, that’s my love, there. I think probably my staff probably doesn’t want me out there with them anymore. That’s certainly what really puts blood into my veins. But I’ve found that I had a lot more of a love of construction than I thought before. I’m sure it’s a combination of new things, I’m learning a lot as I go through and do it. I didn’t have formal education in it or anything like that, so it’s always nice to learn something new and I really enjoy the planning aspect of it, and over the years work on different facilities and fields and you try and find someone who knows how it was built, or what happened here or what’s in the ground there… the nice thing is that now that I’m planning it, building it, and then maintaining it, I kind of have all that insider knowledge and it really is nice. What’s the biggest challenge of your job? It sounds cliché to say it, but I think it’s the people aspect of it. I had a professor in college, Dr. Andrew McNitt, he’s one of the best professors I had. He gave lectures, going on for weeks about turf and soils and dirt and at the end of it, he’d say, “Now don’t forget, the grass will grow itself, it’s everything else that’s hard.” As a college student, you don’t really understand what that means. But once you get out there, you do. If all we had to do was worry about the grass, you have a pretty easy job, but it’s the people, probably. Not just staff, but people in general, especially now that we reach a lot of people in what we do. And unfortunately, you don’t really hear the thank you’s as much as you do the complaints. CO N T I N UE D
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MTC TURF NEWS
