Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The regular season opens this Friday afternoon and evening across Fremont County. Riverton is at home against Cody in a game that already has playoff positioning implications. The Broncs have fielded a great team for a long time, but Riverton is a vastly improved team, stepping up each year under head coach Mark Lenhardt.
Wind River hosts Lingle-Ft. Laramie, a team that ran it up on them twice last season. With the way the Cougars hit, and if they can control their turnovers it’s not going to be a good evening for the Doggers.
Dubois hosts Ten Sleep Saturday afternoon.
No matter where teams play, or what time of day the kickoff is scheduled, one thing is certain: the fields will be legally marked and aligned according to National High School Federation football rules.
Dubois has a smaller 40×80-yard field to accommodate the fast pace of 6-man football. The other teams, Wind River, Shoshoni, and Wyoming Indian, in 9-man, and Riverton and Lander, playing traditional 11-man football, all play on the same-sized field.
The stadiums all differ in their design, but you can guarantee that the field will be exactly 53 1/3 yards wide and 120 yards long from end zone to end zone.
Most fans never consider the time and effort it takes to change over an acre of grass into a legal playing surface. The measuring, mowing, marking, and field setup take a tremendous amount of planning and preparation.
Riverton and Lander don’t have to worry about that, neither do the junior high kids at Arapahoe. Their fields are made of artificial turf with lines, hash marks, numbers, and end zones all permanently marked.
The responsibility for setting up traditional grass fields varies from location to location. At most schools, it falls on the custodial and groundskeeping staff. Depending on the length of the season, the field may be striped four or five times. A late October painting means extra work, but it also means you’re in the playoffs.
For a long time, at a minority of schools, such as Shoshoni, the duty fell primarily to the coaching staff. It was a tradition in Shoshoni for the coaching staff, the head custodian, and several teachers to get together on the last Saturday morning before the first home game to cut and mark the field.
A few schools still line the field with powdered chalk. The days of lime are long gone, but you can still find a few cans of lime neutralizer in medical supply cabinets. A tribute to that painful, blinding sensation that comes from a face full of sideline marker.
Not all schools follow the old Shoshoni plan. Local professional painters do the work at several schools. Airless sprayers and portable compressors have eased the job over the past few years.
There is a mixed school of thought among coaches and groundskeepers concerning the proper chemical combination to use in lining a football field. Schools with large groundskeeping staff usually paint the lines with oil-based paint and repeat the process every two weeks or so.
Smaller schools are more apt to burn in the lines with a defoliant mixed in the paint. Diesel fuel mixed with white oil-based paint makes an effective and lasting field marker.
The paint fades over the first few weeks of the season, but the lines remain as the grass under the paint is killed by the diesel fuel. You can still see the lines during track season, but after a typical summer, the grass grows back and the field returns to its natural, unmarked state.
Stories abound about poorly marked fields. It always seems to happen on the road; you never hear a player, fan, or coach of the home team complain.
The worst field I ever played on was at Manderson-Hyattville. The field ran North-South and had permanent corrugated lines cut into it, the kind of deep corrugates usually reserved for beets or corn.
The corduroy surface was bad enough, but a huge alkali patch started at the southern 15-yard line and extended into the end zone. A white line on the white alkaline surface was impossible to see. Naturally, the alkali patch was on the home field’s sideline; the visitors’ side was clearly marked.
In Lusk, Jerry Oestmann, a math teacher with a summer painting business, painted the field. One year a superintendent thought it was a waste of money to hire a teacher to do the work that the grounds keepers could easily do. It wasn’t so easy. The poor custodians ended up creating a slip form, spilled paint, didn’t get the lines straight or the hash marks in alignment. After a couple of weeks, they mowed the grass close to get rid of the lines, and Jerry came back and did it perfectly.
Lusk doesn’t worry about that anymore; Gibson Field at Fullmer Stadium is now a state-of-the-art artificial surface. It’s a great field.
My most memorable field prep experiences come with my late friend and legendary coach, Harold Bailey. We’d meet on a Saturday morning before the first game. It was usually Harold, Tim Ervin, Harold’s assistant, Mike Powell, the legendary band teacher, Steve Gresbach, and me, the junior high head coach.
We’d start with finding holes from the previous years and drive stakes into them. From the stakes, we stretched baler twine in five-yard increments. It was a great, foolproof method of applying a little white oil-based paint with a hefty portion of diesel.
The problem came every year around the 40- or 45-yard line. Harold wasn’t the most patient man, and soon he was “eyeballing” the lines. Harold grew tired of stretching string and mowing with the wheels on the string as a guide, then painting down the middle of the cut path.
Yes, the lines were a little off-center in spots.
Officials always measured at games played at Bailey Field since the lines could vary enough to change from a fourth down into a first down.
Last Saturday morning in Riverton, I watched Wind River and the Wolverine JV mix it up. In the process, I started talking to linesman Ray Purel of Lander about the changes in football. Ray graduated from a school in Michigan in 1979. A few years after I did at Wind River, but the stories of helmets, field conditions, the lime that sometimes got into your eyes when you slid after a tackle, and the atrocious nature of our helmets.
But that’s for another story. Ray and I were impressed by the straight lines, even surface, and much safer playing conditions you find today at Wolverine Field and across the valley at Bill Bush Stadium.
The game hasn’t improved much over the past few decades, but the field conditions have. Today, you can’t find a bad field anywhere in Fremont County, and that is a tribute to the pride and dedication of the people who prepare it.