The field at Wallace Wade Stadium bears the visible and invisible marks of constant use—its wear and tear a living record of every game, practice, and repainting. Maintaining the Bermuda grass, a variety chosen for its resilience, is both a technical and artistic endeavor that demands constant vigilance. Over time, repeated mowing, painting, and traffic from machinery and athletes can stress the turf, flattening its “grain” and creating uneven textures or distorted lines. To combat this, John and his team continually adjust their patterns, alternating mowing directions and repainting approaches to allow the field to recover. Tools like the Kombi brush help the grass stand upright again, while nightly sprinkler cycles and periodic aeration relieve soil compaction, letting the field quite literally breathe.

Even with these methods, the field still shows traces of its labor—slight depressions where cleats dig in, or faint outlines from paint layers that have built up over months of use. Deep tine aeration, topdressing with USGA sand, and verticutting act as restorative procedures, renewing the turf’s structure after periods of stress. Bermuda grass is uniquely suited for this cycle of strain and renewal; its rhizomes and stolons grow both downward and outward, allowing it to “heal” quickly. John describes this process with a sense of pride—how the grass thrives when it’s “beat up,” how it endures and regenerates.

The wear and tear, then, are not signs of neglect but evidence of an ongoing relationship between people, technology, and nature. Each line repainted, each patch reseeded, and each pass of the mower represents a negotiation between damage and repair, precision and imperfection. Beneath the crisp blue-and-white logos lies a field constantly in recovery—its surface smoothed, brushed, and coaxed back to life through care. What fans see on game day is the product of this invisible choreography: a living canvas restored again and again, proof that resilience is not the absence of wear, but the art of renewal.