By: Annie Xu

From war shows, to concerts to racing, the Coliseum hosts it all. Scott Lupold, the Grounds manager of the stadium, said that when anything other than a football or soccer game is in the Coliseum, he “feels uneasy.” The lengths that Lupold goes through to make sure the field is clean is enough to make him lose a couple nights of sleep. He said himself, “I’m a worrier by nature.”

The Coliseum has morphed from a football turf to a race track and back again to a football turf. As the Coliseum has gotten more and more booked, the time between events has shrunk drastically. This forced Lupold to come up with quicker methods of changing the stadium.

After a grueling event, Lupold used to care for the grass and bring it back to life. With less time in between events, this has become an unviable option. Instead of slowly healing the grass after events, the caretakers of the Coliseum are ripping out the old grass and starting fresh with new sod. This normally happens after an event has damaged the grass a lot.

Unfortunately majority of the events in the stadium damage the grass to a great extent. This made the amount of time spent repairing the field far less. Getting new sod for a whole stadium is not cheap—it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to change the whole field. Grass farms are not only expensive but also unsustainable for the environment. They come with heavy carbon footprints.

Lupold is great at his job, but he still doubts himself every time. After two consecutive Rammstein concerts, Lupold and his team only had a couple days to freshen up the field for the USC against Arizona State game. He was nervous until the Trojans and Sun Devils had played for a couple of minutes. None of the players had slipped and none of the turf had gotten ripped up,” Lupold said, “if you go back and look at those highlights … you wouldn’t be able to tell.” However, he added, “you’re going to worry about it as a groundskeeper.”