Maintaining the splendor of the grass

Baseball may have its mystical field of dreams in the movies, but in a real-life ballpark, somebody had better be taking care of all that grass.

For the Baltimore Orioles, that somebody is Nicole Sherry, AG ’02, who was hired during this year’s off-season as head groundskeeper at the team’s Camden Yards stadium, becoming just the second woman to hold such a position in major league history.

Even while she works 100-hour weeks during the summer and rarely sees her family during the Orioles’ home stands, Sherry says she considers herself amazingly fortunate to be where she is in her career.

“There are only 30 major league teams, so there are only 30 head groundskeeper jobs,” she says. “I knew for some time that this was what I wanted, but I also knew that those 30 people don’t leave their jobs very often, so there aren’t a lot of openings. I was very lucky that things worked out so well for me.”

Persistence and preparation have helped Sherry as well, beginning with the associate’s degree in turf management that she earned at Delaware Technical and Community College. She went on from there to UD, where she majored in general agriculture while working as a golf course greenskeeper.

Just as she was starting to get a bit restless in the golf course job, she says, she came home from work one day and walked into the living room, where her father was watching a baseball game on television. Something about it caught Sherry’s eye.

“The Phillies were playing the Braves in Atlanta, and I stopped to admire the way the grass was cut in that distinctive pattern you see at ballparks,” she recalls. “I realized that I knew how to do that—we did the same kind of thing at the golf course—and I wondered if I’d be able to get a job in baseball.”

A couple of years earlier, when Sherry had visited the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium on a college field trip to learn firsthand about turf management, she had spoken with the team’s head groundskeeper. Now, she hunted up the business card she had saved and gave him a call.

“I can’t believe I still had the card and that I called him out of the blue two years later,” she says. “But, I got an internship with the Orioles,” followed by a full-time job as assistant groundskeeper. Sherry worked there for three years and then took what many considered a step down. She moved to the minor league Trenton (N.J.) Thunder team as head groundskeeper in 2004.

“A lot of people thought I was making a mistake to leave a major league team and go to Trenton,” Sherry says. “But my boss in Baltimore told me that, in order to make it in a top job in the majors, you have to prove yourself in the minors. So, I decided to take a chance and prove that I could do a head groundskeeper’s job.”

Her risk soon paid off. Just two years later, her former boss decided to leave the Orioles for a university position, and Sherry interviewed for and was offered the job in Baltimore.

“I always believed I’d get to this position with a major league team someday,” she says. “I just never thought it would be right here in Baltimore or that it would happen so fast.”

Her responsibilities are much the same as they were in Trenton, where the experience “prepared me for anything,” Sherry says, but the scale of the job and the degree of scrutiny she undergoes is very different at Camden Yards.

The Thunder had a groundskeeping staff of three, while in Baltimore she supervises a staff of 26, including the 17 members of “tarp crew.” That crew works every home game, no matter how clear the skies appear, standing by in case the infield needs to be covered during a rain delay. With the bigger staff and a significantly larger budget in the major leagues, Sherry says she can spend more time planning and coordinating the work rather than “running around doing everything” herself.

The biggest change in her current job, she says, is the fact that all Orioles games are televised.

“In Trenton, we had four games a season that were televised, all locally, so that means that for most games, only the 6,000 fans who came to the ballpark were seeing the field,” Sherry says. “Of course, you want it to look good for them, but that’s nowhere near as stressful as being on TV every night, knowing that everyone is critiquing the field.”

On days when the Orioles are playing at home, Sherry is at the ballpark from 9 a.m. until at least an hour or two after the game ends, often after midnight. Her workdays are a more normal eight hours when the team is on the road, but, she notes, the field is still there—grass growing, rain falling, problems arising—whether a game is being played or not. In the winter, after the first frost has stopped the grass from growing, she stays busy ordering supplies, maintaining equipment, preparing a budget and hiring and training new crew members for the coming season.

The most stressful factor of all, Sherry says, is the weather. She relies on radar and other high-tech forecasting equipment, but there are plenty of surprises. In Baltimore, where Opening Day has been known to feature snow flurries and August to bring scorching heat and drought, the stadium is open to the elements, she notes.

“You’re always working around Mother Nature,” Sherry says. “And, in the end, Mother Nature always wins. You just have to realize that no matter how carefully you plan, the weather can completely change those plans in an instant.”

Still, she says, she loves the job and can’t imagine doing anything else. She says she’s been “completely fascinated by grass” since her first class in turf management, and she urges other agriculture students to think about careers involving sports.

“Groundskeeper is not a job that you see or think about very much, but there are more jobs out there than you might realize,” she says. “There are a lot of minor league teams, and there are a lot of universities with athletic fields to keep in shape.”

As for her work in a male-dominated career, Sherry says she never gave much thought to what implications that might have. There were so many other women in her classes in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, she says, that she didn’t foresee being a rarity in professional baseball.

“There are other women on groundskeeping staffs in the majors and minors, so it’s only a matter of time before there are more of us in the top job,” Sherry says. “Heather Nabozny has been head groundskeeper with the Detroit Tigers since 1999, so I’m not the first woman to hold this position in the league, and I’m certainly not going to be the last.”

by Ann Manser, AS ’73