FIELD OF THE YEAR SCHOOLS AND PARKS SPORTING GROUNDS
Dudley : The school was investing a lot into the course , so we looked into submitting the course for Field of the Year around 2020 . I sent an e-mail to SFMA to see if it was even possible , because it had never been done before . They got back to me and said the Sporting Grounds category is for anything outside of the big four of baseball , softball , football and soccer . It was like , “ Okay , we might have something here .” So , I told the school what we were thinking of doing , and they were excited by the potential of it . We worked toward it the last few years , and were able to pull it off in 2023 . It was a collaborative effort for the last few years to make the course what it is now .
SFM : Coming to Brownsburg , did you have any kind of feel for managing and maintaining a cross country course ? Was there anything that surprised you ? Dudley : I never really got the feel for maintaining one at a high level until I got to Brownsburg . When we first started taking care of it , we were just mowing it like a common area — 2 1 / 2 inches tall — like it ’ s no big deal . The coaches asked if we could mow it shorter , so , each year , we started to push the limits on what we could do to mow it shorter . We adjusted our fertility program to get the grass greener , to be able to be able to handle the low heights . It ’ s not irrigated , so we were trying to figure out how far we could puh it with without suffering turf loss . We ’ ve gotten into a pretty good routine the last couple of years ; but it was a little bit of a learning curve at first trying to learn the course itself and what they wanted from a cross country standpoint . We found that sweet spot a couple years ago and have been able to slightly tweak it here and there the best we can .
SFM : The course is open to the public . What kind of challenges does that present to you ? Dudley : It ’ s mostly when we ’ re trying to do anything like trying to mow or make an application of any kind . There ’ s a neighborhood right next to the course and there are a couple of schools nearby . It was kind of a
SFM : Can you give us an idea of the length of the course , the terrain and other details ? Dudley : The course is mostly flat and is mostly tall fescue , which works out well for us since it ’ s not irrigated , and it is a very drought-tolerant grass . The course itself is 3.1 miles ( 5K ) for the high school course , and there ’ s a middle school course on it as well that ’ s 1.8 miles . The course is mostly run on grass , but there ’ s a wooded path that is a crushed ag lime that runs through the woods . There are a couple of bridges that go over a creek , but it ’ s mostly flat with tall fescue grass .
Brownsburg is in the suburbs of Indianapolis , and there are not a lot of schools around here that have the land for cross country . Brownsburg bought this land to build a cross country course out here . It used to be a corn field , and then 10 years ago they had the vision to build a championship cross country course to be able to host state sectionals , regionals and conference meets , etc .
14 SportsField Management | May 2024 sportsfieldmanagementonline . com