Classify Your Field
The quality of the infield skin you keep will often be limited by certain factors. Of those factors the most important are:
1) Do you have access to water for managing soil moisture? Water is the life blood of an infield skin, with it, the ball hops more truly, the surface is more resilient, cleats penetrate more easily and disturb the soil surface less and dust control is maintained. The soil make-up of your infield will need to be adjusted depending on whether you have access to water or not. The other important factor you must consider is:
2) What level management will this field receive? Is the field you manage maintained by it’s own dedicated crew like a professional team? Or is it taken care of on an intermittent basis by a regular employee? Maybe there is no dedicated staff maintaining it at all and the field relies on unskilled volunteers to maintain the field. Maintenance levels also play a determining roll in the make-up of your infield skin.
Once you have answered these two questions, you will typically fall into one of three classifications shown below:
The rest of this series will be posted right here, in the Beacon Blog. Feel free to submit any questions you’d like addresses or post your own comment here.
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Back from STMA 2010 | Beacon Athletics Says:
February 10th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
[...] You can read the first article now: Classify your Field. [...]
Don Savard, CSFM, CGM Says:
February 12th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Hi Paul,
At the STMA conference, you mentioned a combination of diatomateous earth, calcined clay and vitrified clay in the topdressing layer as each material had different characteristics.
Please expand on this.
Thanks,
Don
Paul Zwaska Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Don,
Those three materials, plus crushed aggregate, are the 4 different types of topdressings on the market right now. Each acts a little differently from the other. A groundskeeper’s job is to know the attributes of each of the materials so that you can make a more educated decision on what will work best for your situation. The topdressing on an infield skin serves as a mulch to help slow the evaporative process from getting down to the base soil. Topdressings also create a buffer zone between the player’s cleats and the moist soil beneath that topdressing to help prevent the players from slipping. These are just some of the benefits of a topdressing on an infield soil.
As far as choosing which to use, it all comes down to each groundskeeper’s own preference and the environmental (weather) conditions that you deal with. For instance, in more humid climates of the eastern and southern US, you typically want your field to dry quicker so topdressing materials that don’t absorb a lot of water, like vitrified clays or crushed aggregates. These materials typically absorb less amounts of water then others. Since they absorb less they dry more quickly at the surface. If they dry too fast for you, you can always blend in some calcined clay topdressing material into your topdressing to increase water holding capacity at the surface.
What you need to remember is that the primary reason for a topdressing on an infield skin is to slow the evapoative process from reaching your base soils. This helps to manage the moisture in your infield skin. I will have much to say about this in a blog later in this series of blogs that I am writing about infield skins. So stay tuned and thanks for your question. If you need more info, call me at Beacon.