Don’t tell Mike Jones that watching grass grow is boring.

“I’m going crazy right now because I can’t cut it, because we sprayed last week,” said Jones, an assistant football coach at St. Aloysius. “I usually cut it every other day to every third day.”

While many schools rely on maintenance crews or boosters to cut their football fields, Jones and Warren Central head coach Curtis Brewer are among the handful of coaches who still do their own yard work. They are coaches who can rattle off grass types, growing tips and cutting styles as easily as they can an opponent’s scouting report.

“I enjoy riding on the tractor. Once school starts, since I’m the dean of students, I’ll probably want to go get on the tractor,” Jones said with a laugh.

Brewer and Jones earned their grass-cutting stripes in different ways. Jones spent more than a decade in the lawn care business before becoming a full-time teacher at St. Al. Not long after, his background led him to take over at least part of the field maintenance duties.

Brewer was an assistant coach at Warren Central when he took over as its chief grass cutter about 20 years ago. The school’s maintenance crew used to handle it, but would sometimes get sidetracked by more pressing repair jobs. The coaching staff took over and has been doing it ever since, Brewer said.

These days, WC assistant Buddy Wooten also helps with the cutting, Brewer said.

“It turned into the maintenance department cutting it, and if something else happens a lot of times it didn’t get cut,” Brewer said. “I started just trying to keep the game field up, then ended up doing the practice field too.”

Like Jones, Brewer said he enjoys his time on the tractor.

“It’s that time when you think about everything you want. You don’t have a telephone,” Brewer said.

For both coaches, however, summer is hardly a vacation.

While players take most of July off as a break between offseason workouts and fall practice, Brewer and Jones get on the tractor to cut grass two or three times a week. The work they put in now will mean the difference between a lush green carpet of soft Bermuda grass, or a rutted cow pasture of dead and browning weeds when the season starts in late August.

From the start of football season, through soccer season in the winter, then track and special events in the spring, the field takes a beating, Brewer said. Making sure it’s properly watered, seeded and cut during the summer is a top priority.

“The biggest thing is, if you don’t take care of it all the time, the football field is used from August until May. The only recovery time is the summer months,” Brewer said. “If you don’t care for it now, it won’t be ready.”

Taking care of the field is a full-time job. Adding in practice fields at both St. Al and Warren Central, which also need to be cut several times a week, it can take three to four hours to cut everything. That doesn’t include several hours a week watering, which is done by sprinklers that need to be turned on and off, fertilizing or aerating the grass. Other chores, such as spraying pesticides, are handled by professional companies contracted to the schools.

In all, Jones and Brewer spend 10 to 12 hours a week on a tractor during the summer, driving perfectly planned lines around their fields. Each pass – of which there are several in each cutting session – is designed to keep the grass growing the right way, Jones said.

“If you’re going to cut it length-wise for a while, it’s all going to go in the same direction. You’ve just got to keep the grass from slanting to one side,” Jones said. “The main thing now is you have to water. It’s not that it’s dead, it’s just that the top of the Bermuda is what’s green. When you cut it short, it exposes that brown root.”

The field work continues into the season, when it becomes less necessary but more difficult to cut. The heavy usage of a field during football season, with junior high and varsity games and practices nearly every day, plus painting on one off day, makes it hard to find time to get the proper maintenance done.

“You’ll cut it on a Saturday or Sunday, but then you have games Monday and Tuesday. By the end of Wednesday you won’t cut it again because it has to be painted,” Brewer said. “The game schedule dictates your cutting schedule. During the summer, you cut as much as you can.”

All of the hard work pays off in the fall. Seeing a good-looking field on Friday night is a point of pride for an entire program.

“When our players go to other places that don’t maintain the fields as well, they see it and recognize it,” Brewer said. “It’s a lot of pride for all the coaches.”