Aiming for the Big Leagues

When time came for him to line up a summer internship, Auburn University senior Bradley Kirkland decided to pull out all the stops and aim for the Major Leagues-literally.

The turfgrass management major got on the phone and started pitching himself and his experience with the AU athletic turf team to the groundskeepers for the Phillies, the Cubs, the Brewers and the Red Sox.

In Boston, it was Sox grounds pro David Mellor who fielded Kirkland's call, liked what he heard and offered the Mobilian one of nine summer intern spots on the grounds crew.

And the experience has been, in a word, awesome.

"I really look forward to going in to work every day," Kirkland says from his temporary home in Boston. "I'm doing what I love to do.

"Plus, I love baseball and I love watching it, so I'm just enjoying seeing as much of it as I can," he says. "It's extremely exciting to see that park packed out for each and every game."

It's also extremely exciting to be a part of making that park-historic Fenway-the picturesque venue for baseball that it is.

And since joining the grounds crew May 15, Kirkland has been a vital part of the team. Take his first week on the job, for instance, when he got the nod to install the pattern on the field for the huge Red Sox-Yankees series.

"Dave asked if any of us (interns) had experience with mowing in patterns, and since that was basically my job at Auburn with the baseball field, I told him I did," Kirkland says. "The next day, three other guys and I had a tryout to see if anyone could do good enough to put in the pattern for the Yankees game. I was lucky enough to be the one selected."

That, he says, "was an absolute shock and a dream come true!"

"I never expected to get the chance to do something like that while I was here, and to do it for the Yankees game was unbelievable to me," he says.

Of course, not all aspects of the job are that exciting and glamorous. In fact, there are a lot of long hours and hard manual labor involved in maintaining a 94-year-old field. Every day, there's plenty of trash pickup (from the game the night before), mowing, sweeping, hand-watering, rak-ing, fertilizing and painting the field.

And during the game, the Red Sox grounds crew is ever sitting on ready. Even though Major League Baseball requires that the field be dragged only once per game, Mellor has his grounds crew race out with draggers and rakes at the bottom of the third, fifth and seventh innings to smooth the infield.

Everything is done with two things foremost in mind.

"Safety and playability: that's what Dave stresses over everything," Kirkland says. "He makes sure we know that the first goal of our job is keeping a safe playing field."

Kirkland's internship wraps up Aug. 12, so that he can get back to Auburn in time for fall semester-his final before graduating in December.

Turfgrass management will actually be Kirkland's second degree from Auburn. He earned his first, a bachelor's in secondary math education, in May 2004-roughly two semesters after acknowledging to himself and others that the last thing he wanted to spend his life doing was teaching high-school math.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn't that," he says. Shortly before that graduation, he decided that turfgrass management was the field for him. He entered the program with his sights set on someday working as superintendent of a golf course.

"I guess I thought about athletic fields, but I didn't think there would be that much potential for getting a job," Kirkland says.

But then, last summer, he landed a part-time gig with the athletic field management team at Auburn, and he was hooked.

"Golf courses are beautiful, but the way sports fields are now, you can take a field and make it a piece of art," he says. "I could still work at a golf course and love it, but my dream is to be a groundskeeper at the professional or collegiate level."

That's why he aimed for the top on his internship.

"The competition for the job I want is stiff, so the higher experience you can get, the better chance you'll have of getting something," Kirkland says. "I think my experience at Auburn and with the Red Sox will definitely put me at an advantage."

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