Tips From The Pros
as a head turf manager in professional football. He graduated from Colorado State University’s Turfgrass Management program
and now operates and owns Championship Sports Turf Systems.
INFLATABLE TARP ROLLERS ARE A GAME CHANGER FOR SPORTS FIELD MANAGERS
Sports surface covers, field tarps and winter turf blankets are great technologies that field managers use for a variety of purposes. You see them everywhere on high-quality athletic complexes and facilities because they work to help prepare higher quality playing surfaces. But as useful a tool as they are for turfgrass management and sports field preparation, they can get to be a bit tiresome for the turf team when you have to put them on and off a field frequently.
It’s the covering (deploy) and uncovering (strike) of a playing surface with larger field cover systems that can be challenging. Large, wet field cover sections are sometimes heavy to handle and may require a team of 6-12 or more people to fold the cover sections, roll the folded sections onto a heavy, rigid plastic drum and protect unsecured windward edges all the while. Larger covers are typically folded in halves a few times down to a workable width, then rolled onto a rigid drum of plastic or metal to the sides of the field.
Anyone who has deployed larger field tarps for a living knows the tricky parts are during the unfolding or folding the field tarp section where the wind can wreak havoc on your plans to cover the field. But Covermaster® has come up with a game-changer of a solution, I believe, with their new TarpMate Air™ Inflatable Tarp Roller drums. Longer, lightweight inflatable field cover rollers can eliminate the need to fold before rolling, save significant labor in field cover deploys and strikes, extend the life of your field covers and minimize storage space needs for your field covers. And by not exposing loose cover edges when you eliminate the need to fold, your operation becomes much less prone to wind problems. Welcome to the new day of field cover rollers!
Sports field covers are the superheroes of any quality sports field management operation. They can help prevent rainouts and snowouts. They can warm the surface and extend growing seasons. Heck, they can even prevent coaches from using a field under repair, as they are known to do. But because of the labor needed to operate a larger field cover system, specifically during installs and removal, this tool hasn’t always been practical for every operation.
Turf Tips 101: Benefits of Inflatable Tarp Rollers.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an entire blog about how to deploy field covers in wind, and you can see how a lot of the personnel used in deploys and strikes are simply there to hold down unsecured, windward edges of the field cover, sometimes half the crew is just there to hold down wind-exposed field cover edges as the rest of the team folds and rolls.
Inflatable tarp field rollers are so lightweight, they can be made in customizable lengths up to 90 feet long, or more. The inflatable tarp rollers are easily inflated using a common leaf-blower. Now we can eliminate the need to unsecure any edges for folding, we can simply pin/unpin as we roll when deploying and striking in breezy conditions. This is huge in my opinion! Not only to strongly reduce wind issues, but if you’ve ever tried to fold a large vented turf cover (grow tarp) when it is wet with dew in the morning, you know how the cover tends to stick to itself, making folds tricky and labor intensive. Usually, we would just wait until things dried up a few hours before removing the growth blankets in the mornings for this reason. Not an issue if you use long, lightweight tarp rollers and no longer have to fold. The trickiest part about tarping is the wind. Wind tends to get under unsecured edges of a field cover and blow the tarp around. As I addressed in my earlier blog, these conditions can get serious in stronger winds, and there are potential safety issues with your crew members. But think about this. If you don’t need to fold or unfold a field cover or larger section, you can simply pin and secure as you roll out the cover (or the opposite for taking covers off the field). There are just so many advantages in eliminating the need to fold field covers.
Eliminating field cover folds also will help during field cover deploys as it will be much easier to position the cover on the field without having to guess where it will unfold out to in order to meet the previous section deployed.
Storage benefits.
Once you have rolled a larger field cover or section of field cover onto a rigid tube, you will need a lot more storage space for the field covers. Tarp roller drums are usually about 24-30 inches in diameter. The heavier, rigid ones are between 10-30 feet long. And since the plastic ones are manufactured in 20-foot lengths, you have to couple together drums to get to even 30 ft long. Going much longer than 30-ft. length gets impractically heavy.
As such a 4 or 5 section full-field cover system rolled on rigid drums can take up a lot of storage space when not out on the field in use. Now, what if you have two or three full-field tarp systems, maybe a rain cover, heavier snow cover and perhaps a full-field vented “grow tarp” cover system? That is a lot of drums and a lot of storage space required. So the most efficient way to store larger field covers is to fold them and store them without drums. This is exactly the scenario I faced some 20 years ago. We began deploying and striking our large, 4-section full-field Evergreen® Radiant turf blankests by hand-folding them on and off of flat-faced fork-lift pallets we fabricated just to minimize the number of covers we stored on rigid drums when the covers were not needed on the field. And in my experiences traveling and consulting, I’ve yet to visit a facility that had plenty of storage space. Everyone is stacking stuff everywhere and field covers are often left outside where they may weather and wear out faster.
Covermaster’s new inflatable TarpMate Air™ Roller system greatly reduces storage requirements because after rolling your covers onto them, you can simply deflate the tube and fold or roll the cover and tube for efficient storage when not needed.
If you are installing and taking off full field covers of any type every day or even twice a day, you will really appreciate having the longer, lighter Inflatable Tarp Rollers. You can much more easily accomplish daily on-offs and leave the rolled covers on the sides of the field. If it’s easier to deploy and strike, we would all probably use field covers more often.
Costs.
The cost per foot for an inflatable drum is actually less than the cost/ft. of a rigid drum. However, since you won’t be folding your covers (or not folding as much), you will need to have more total linear feet in length of drums to roll onto. This can actually make an inflatable tarp roller system slightly more expensive as an initial investment compared to rigid drums, but I think you will realize savings in labor far greater than the minimal cost increase compared with a rigid drum system. If you can reduce labor to ¼ or less the total number of people required to deploy and strike your field covers, you will recoup the increased cost very rapidly.
Trying out #CoverMaster tarp roller we purchased through #Ewing@ewingboho for our #GameOnGrass covers. Started with normal 9-10 people it takes to pull the 600' by 75' covers but actually only took 3 people to finish. Works great. @CarolinaGreenCopic.twitter.com/N4moPDCjCr
— Chad Price (@CgcChad) November 9, 2018
Finally, I believe that if it is much easier to put out and take off your field covers, you will naturally use them more often and in a better way. Think of how you would use you various field covers if you could somehow snap your fingers anytime you want and your field covers are magically installed or removed. Well, this may not be the same deal but I do believe we would use field covers more often if it were easier to do. The result is inevitably a better, higher quality playing surface, it stands to reason.
Resources of the Month
Come down to Phoenix this month to the Sports Turf Managers Association Conference and Trade Show. Stop by the Covermaster booth to see all about Inflatable TarpMate Air™ Rollers.
Winter is a great time to learn and relearn solid principles of turfgrass management and science. You can watch all 41 lectures of Dr. Nick Christians Hort 351 Turfgrass Management and Establishment course for free at Iowa State University.
Check out reported soil temperatures in your region. The National Corn Growers Association has a national soil temperature map.
End Quote
“A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.” Fred Allen