Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 8, 1993 TAG: 9312080286
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ In a way, football-crazy Salem worships the ground Scott Sampson walks on.
So when the city landed college football's Stagg Bowl and set out to put on a good show for the ESPN cameras, the guy who was really on the spot was the stadium groundskeeper.
"This being a national TV game," Sampson says, "they want the field as bright as possible."
And we don't mean with lights.
So Sampson started drawing up his game plan months ago.
He's even been pumping iron to get ready for the big game.
It's not his biceps he's building up; it's his bluegrass.
"Ah," sighs his boss, Salem Civic Center Director Carey Harveycutter, with a loving tone, "iron and nitrogen - nothing will make a field green up faster."
Unless it's spray paint, and Sampson has some of that on hand, too, just in case.
Somehow, the word has spread among the two teams meeting Saturday - Mount Union College from Ohio and Rowan College from New Jersey - that they're playing in a domed stadium.
After all, the reasoning goes, why else would the Stagg Bowl, the national championship game for small colleges, have moved from sunny Florida to Virginia in the dead of December?
Of course, Salem, for all of its sports-mindedness, did not build a domed stadium. But to accommodate its first Stagg Bowl, Salem has had to make so many changes to the stadium that while they're at it, maybe city workers should just go ahead and add a roof.
Let's just check some of the work orders:
You can't sell reserved-seat tickets without reserved seats. So this summer, crews started numbering the stadium's 8,000 seats.
The goalposts in college football are narrower than in high school games, so the city had to buy two new crossbars. Cost to the taxpayers: $1,674.50. Hassle to stadium workers: Enormous. One of the new crossbars had to be sent back to the factory - twice - because it was defective.
College football also uses a 25-second clock to count the time between plays. So Salem had to buy a clock. Two, of them, actually, one for each end of the field. Cost to the taxpayers: About $1,400. Hassle: The wind blew one of them over the first weekend it was up. Near as anyone can tell, even end-zone clocks can take a licking and keep on ticking.
A sign on Interstate 81 isn't enough; now Salem Stadium has its own exit ramp on the information superhighway.
Hey, a pay phone outside the men's room just won't do, not for a national championship game.
For the Stagg Bowl, C&P Telephone will wire the stadium with maybe 40 extra phone lines. While they were at it, the telephone crews went ahead and laid in new fiber-optic cables. "No one would have ever thought you'd have a high-school football stadium with fiber optics," marvels the complex's assistant director, John Saunders. (No, but somehow we should have known if there was one, it would be in Salem.)
And then there's ESPN, the all-sports cable channel that will broadcast the game. To make room for the ESPN crew, Salem has had to expand the press box and even install an industrial-strength electrical transformer (you can't just plug all those satellite trucks into wall sockets, son).
The only change Salem nixed?
ESPN wanted Salem to move the flagpole behind the east end zone, to get a clear view of field goals and point-after kicks. The network will settle for a camera crew on a moveable platform, instead.
Even Salem has its limits.
\ While the football coaches at Rowan and Mount Union worry about wide receivers running their deep routes, Sampson frets about his own deep roots.
All year long, he's been ladling on the fertilizer. "By March, we had 6 inches of grass out there," Sampson beams.
Every time a high-schooler's cleat snagged a clot of turf this fall, Sampson winced. "After every game, we'd take a turf-builder and fill in every divot," he says.
And each time a holder for a place-kick pawed the earth to give his kicker a better angle, Sampson groaned.
"That field is his baby," Saunders says. "If you go and dig a hole to kick a field goal, he'll go crazy."
Last weekend's rains didn't faze Sampson, though. Better to green up his precious patch of lawn, he says.
(Besides, the field has a drainage system underneath. So first thing Monday morning, when Sampson tested the field with a firm stomp, it barely squished.)
Green's not the only color Sampson's concerned with, though.
To make sure the yard markers are sufficiently impressive for the TV cameras, he's already lathered on 40 gallons of white paint - and may apply more in a "touch up" before Saturday.
Not that everything about the Stagg Bowl is entrusted to the folks in Salem, though.
These may be small colleges, but here's how big a deal this game is: You don't just paint the end zone any old way. Instead, the NCAA, the governing body for college athletics, contracts with a Kansas City company to supply the stencils the grounds crew uses to mark the field.
Starting Saturday afternoon when it became clear that Mount Union and Rowan would be the finalists, a half-dozen workers at Missouri Paint Supply began sketching and cutting the giant plastic stencils that spell out the teams' nicknames - "Raiders" and "Profs."
These templates, as they're called, were shipped in by air Tuesday. By dusk, Sampson and his crew already had one end zone nearly completed.
The NCAA leaves nothing to chance: It even supplies the paint, a specially formulated brand that's gentle on the grass and vivid to the eye. (A sports story wouldn't be a sports story without statistics, so here they are: it's 45 gallons of white, 40 gallons of red and 20 gallons of blue.)
We weren't kidding about the green paint, either.
The Division II college football championship will be played Saturday in Florence, Ala., on a Bermuda grass field.
"Bermuda goes dormant," says Wayne Burrow, the NCAA's assistant director of championships, "so they paint the field green."
But Sampson is betting Salem's grass will be green enough to go it alone. After all, that's the Salem way.
by CNB