January is often a month where a lot is going on behind the scenes in the baseball and softball world.  In professional baseball, it’s often tied to free agency.  In college, winter workouts and scrimmages.  In high school and little league, tryouts and workouts as well.  Also, many field managers are either preparing their fields for play or starting to think about what projects will need to be finished before long.  It’s a time for trade shows, like the SFMA Conference, among other local and regional clinics too.  Although it isn’t always a big month for playing the game, it is no less important.  Behind the scenes, we are fielding phone calls, visiting fields and our Homefield Crews are hard at work renovating ballfields in the warmer reaches of the United States as crunch time is here for places like Florida, with players soon arriving for Spring Training. We’re going to dive in with updates on some of the projects our Homefield Crews and friends have been up to.  

In the West, our crew based out of Utah, has been hard at work helping prepare fields in California, all the way to West Texas to get ready for the season.  Cam, Ryan, Travis and Jeremy have been renovating beautiful facilities like Southwest University Park, home of the El Paso Chihuahuas, the Sacramento State Baseball field and the East Sacramento Little League fields.  Our friends with Desert Green Turf and others have also been a big part of projects like the one in El Paso.

Meanwhile, in the Sunshine State, our Homefield Crews made up of Steve, Mike and Mack, Tyler and Zach respectively, have been tag teaming multiple Spring Training facilities and high schools as their seasons are almost upon us.  Facilities like the Atlanta Braves Spring Training, which was damaged by Hurricane Ian, the Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates complexes, were all on the docket for the month.  Our friends from St. John’s Turf and Marschand’s Athletic Field Services have also been involved in helping renovate and prep these and other fields for the season in Florida.

The SFMA Conference this year just finished up in Salt Lake City, Utah and as always, it was a great time.  It’s the largest show in our industry and being able to catch up with all of our customers, distributors and employees that are scattered around the country in one place is invaluable.  It was somewhat of a home turf event for us, as our Western DuraEdge operation is based out of Odgen, UT, just north of Salt Lake.  

Afterwards, we hosted the MiLB symposium.  It’s an excellent time to bring together all the field managers from the MiLB to share ideas and help set the path for the industry in the future.  We are very grateful to be so involved with professional baseball as a whole and we are glad to learn more from our friends at the highest levels of the sport.  They help us continually strive to improve our products and services and all this trickles down to even our high school and little league customers as well.