Mike Henry / Picture Editor / mh359006@ohiou.edu

Grounds crew worker Kurt Rahske mows the grass next to Chessa Field yesterday morning. The grounds crew spends between six to 10 man hours every weekday morning picking up trash around campus before maintaining the greens.

On most days, the laundry list of tasks that Scott Blower spends his entire 45-mile drive compiling is completely worthless.

Unexpected events in The Convo, a lacrosse camp that no one bothered to tell him about or even a brief rain shower can throw the Ohio University grounds supervisor’s day into chaos.

“Things don’t always work out exactly like you think,” Blower said. “Each day that we have rain, that sets us back a whole 16 hours worth of work of mowing. We have to pull guys off of something else because regardless of what happens, the grass keeps growing.”

It’s the unexpected events that make the 48-year-old wonder why he ever came out of retirement seven years ago.

Blower grew up in Athens and was just four classes shy of graduating from OU when he got an offer to be a branch manager for Barefoot Grass Company. It was an offer too tempting to turn down.

That job led him to start his own lawn care and rental companies. Blower’s companies were extremely successful allowing him to put up the donations that allowed Ohio to build Chessa Field and Drew Park — both of which are named after his children — in 2002.

But the 15- to 20-hour days he spent managing his companies began to take a toll on him and his family, so he retired.He planned to spend time with his kids and manage his investments when he learned that the grounds supervisor position had opened up at OU.

The self-professed Bobcat fan saw the chance to combine his love of athletics and grass. The retirement wasn’t everything he had expected anyway.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Blower said of his retirement. “(Being the grounds supervisor) was something that I just really wanted to do.”

Now, Blower leads a team of five full-time employees responsible for taking care of all of Ohio’s outdoor athletic facilities, including the Ohio Intramural fields.

It is a job that, by anyone’s standards, can be backbreaking.

“Fields are like swimming pools, and fields are like women,” said Tim Heneghan, the director of Peden Stadium. “You have to take care of them every day, they need attention every day. If you let them go, a small problem will manifest itself into a huge problem later.”

On any given day, the grounds crew could be doing any number of activities that no one — including Blower — associates with a groundskeeper’s job description.

The jobs range from repainting parking spaces around campus to picking up trash for six to 10 hours a day.

Their main objective, though, is getting the fields in the best shape possible by game time.

“We’ll do anything to make a field look good,” Blower said. “If you’re painting a line and it doesn’t look right, you get on your hands and knees and scrub it off and do it again.”

Some tasks are worse than others, such as combing the artificial turf at Peden.

By the time the crew is done combing the field they have enough hair to make about six to seven wigs. They also find gum, feathers from birds that may have met an untimely death from a hungry hawk and girls’ hair accessories.

The job’s daily challenges can be hard on Blower, but there is a reason that he still attempts to put together those schedules on his way to work every morning.

He simply loves the feeling of a job well done.

“Everything is 100 miles an hour until they open the gates,” Blower said. “When you have an athletic field that works real good and you have the crowd coming in and you know everything just looks beautiful, that’s probably the most rewarding thing.

“You just look at everything and it’s like ‘OK, that looks good.’”