As cold and dreary as it’s been outside, Dakota Steele is seeing nothing but green grass these days.
You may remember a few weeks ago we posted a photo of the football field taken the day of the home sectional game against Jimtown. The mowing design on the field was created and finished by Steele, and the field looked immaculate for week 10 of the football season. The photo of the field was sent in to a national contest hosted by the Sports Field Managers Association.
And through the support of the Fairfield community and beyond, Steele’s design won the national contest!
Steele was part of the SFMA contest, which pitted his design against 20 other amateur and professional selections from around the country. Steele, in his first year at Fairfield Community Schools, found out late last week that his design had the most votes, which left the former groundskeeper for the Fort Wayne TinCaps virtually speechless. The association formally announced Steele as the winner this morning.
“I was really excited to see that we did win,” stated Steele. “Some of the ballparks and other grounds that were on that voting slate, there are some top ballparks on there. Some quality grounds crews and there’s a lot of detail work to goes into those fields. I’m trying to do a similar thing here at Fairfield, and to match up with some of those crews on the poll, that’s exciting to see mine was chosen.”
For winning, Steele will head to Daytona Beach, Fla., in mid-January for a week-long conference hosted by the SMFA, which is a national who’s who in the turf and design industry. While any trip to Florida would be a welcomed commodity for anyone from Indiana in January, Steele is focusing that trip on the warmer weather coming to Indiana and what he can do to beautify our Fairfield grounds.
“I’m getting to learn from the industry’s best, which is really priceless,” Steele said. “There’s so much I would love to learn about, and the people there are a lot more experienced than I am. I want to continue to learn, and bring some of that back to Fairfield and make our fields and grounds look better than they already do.”
Continued Steele on the momentum of the award, “I had reached out to a bunch of people and asked for their vote, and then saw the school district posted (voting requests) and noticed all the shares that post had. I felt like I had a good chance to win it at that point. The outreach was a lot more than I expected it to be and I’m thankful the community came together to make this be able to happen.”