Death Valley Field Prep for the LSU Tigers

On game days in Tiger Stadium, Trevor Austin sits beyond the south end zone hoping that fans notice everything but the grass. As LSU Sports Turf Manager, Austin leads a team of 12, half of them full time, the other half student workers. Their mission: keep the field inside Louisiana’s secular cathedral pristine. “If you notice something, it means we’re not doing our job,” he said.

The day before the Tigers’ second home game in 2023, Austin surveyed the field while his team checked for divots and painted hashtags, the two SEC logos and both end zones. Everything, including the Eye of the Tiger, had been painted for the season opener two weeks before. Since then, Austin had mowed every day, and now the field’s centerpiece looked like the dregs of a beignet order. “You never realize what goes on behind the scenes until you get into this kind of work,” he said.

Sheldon Rogers learned to paint the Eye of the Tiger by watching Austin at work. “The worst thing you can let me do is steal knowledge,” Rogers said.

That work continues year-round. Consider the mowing alone, a six-day-a-week job, which Austin has turned into a science. Early in the season, when the turf is 100% Bermuda grass, he maintains the field at 5/8 of an inch. Later, when the turf has more leaf coverage, that changes to 3/4 of an inch. As the weather cools and the Bermuda grass goes dormant, Austin and the team seed the field with ryegrass. For part of each year, the field is a combination of both. During the annual Spring Game, for instance, LSU plays on half Bermuda grass and half ryegrass.

Then there’s the painting. For every home game during the regular season, the Turf Management team takes three days to paint the field. They begin with the end zones and borders, applying the first layers on Wednesday. This requires 120 gallons of paint. On Thursday, the team paints hashtags, numbers and crosslines. Add another 25 to 30 gallons to the ongoing total. Friday, the eve before as many as 102,321 fans fill the world’s seventh largest stadium, serves as touch-up day. On this final day of the cycle, the Turf Management team also paints the field logos and yellow lines at the 20-yard marker. They “shadow” the numbers, marking them in five-yard, rather than in typical ten-yard, increments — a Tiger Stadium tradition. They also repaint each end zone. For this work, Austin and the team use another 160 gallons of paint. That’s an average of 300 gallons of paint per home game.

“We paint the colors twice,” said Sheldon Rogers as he circled one of the field’s SEC logos and whitened it with a spray gun. “That’s what makes it pop.” Rogers then rolled the white paint sprayer to midfield and stood inside the faded Eye of the Tiger. There, without stencils, he worked from memory, one color at a time — white, then purple, then gold—adding each layer before the previous had time to dry. Witness the artistry. In one hand, he holds the sprayer as he dances — there’s no other word for what would make Baryshnikov stop and stare — around the field’s centerpiece, careful not to smudge any wet paint. With the flick of a wrist, he creates dramatic flairs at each edge, and within half an hour that iconic Eye of the Tiger materializes. As a child growing up in Port Allen, Rogers would sit in the back seat of the car as his family crossed the Mississippi River. Gazing upon Tiger Stadium, he would tell himself, “Someday, I’m going to work there.”

Such Sisyphean tasks — all the mowing, watering, fertilizing, maintaining proper drainage, the ceaseless painting — means that many NCAA football teams have switched to artificial grass. In October 2023, the AP reported that of the 133 schools competing in NCAA Division I, 94 (71%) use artificial turf, while only 39 (29%) play on natural grass. In 1983, those numbers were 50/50. LSU has never played on artificial turf inside Tiger Stadium. Natural grass, much like those numbers painted in five-yard increments, the H-style goal posts and the white jerseys the players don for home games, remains part of the tradition in Death Valley, where in 2022 the LSU College of Science recorded “two distinctive seismic wave events” during the Tigers’ overtime defeat of Alabama.

While the Turf Management Team works year-round on maintenance, the ultimate goal during the season is to keep the field safe and ready for the players. Between practices and games, this involves regular aeration, adjusting nutrients, filling in sand and applying granular and liquid fertilizer.

Fifteen minutes after that game and all other home games, the Turf Management team takes to the field and begins repair work. They fill divots, water the turf, clear the sidelines of trash. Then Austin and his team go home hoping that no one in the stands witnessed anything other than a game played on an idyllic field. “We’re keeping it as close to perfection as we can get it,” Austin said. “It’s all for the game.”

Did You Know? This year marks the centennial of Tiger Stadium, which opened on November 27, 1924, when LSU hosted Tulane. The original stadium seated 12,000 fans. Today, as many as 102,321 fans fill the stadium on game day. That’s slightly more than the combined populations of Lake Charles (79,633) and Hammond (22,527), as listed in the 2023 Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program. A capacity crowd makes Tiger Stadium the sixth most populated place in Louisiana.