The Rampage sat down with athletic director Michael Hayes to discuss the recent flooding on the new Bermuda Grass field, the damage caused by the flooding and the process of postponing and rescheduling games. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

     Rampage: Can you go through the process of how you postpone a game?

     Michael Hayes: Ultimately we have to decide if safety is an issue for players, if there’s any standing water we typically don’t play. Our schedule and the opposing team’s schedule, they already have regular scheduled games, we both have rescheduled games, so we literally have to go through the calendar day by day and see availability. Then we have to check on officials’ availability once we can find a day or time, so sometimes we have to move JV and varsity games. Secondary to that I have to make sure there’s people to cover the game: there’s ticket takers, there booster club people, there’s people to run the clock. That’s all secondary before we can see if there’s available time to play the game.

     R: What’s the most stressful part of trying to reschedule or relocate a game?

     MH: The stressful part is having availability, us and the AD [athletic director] and the coaches might agree, but we can’t hear back from the referees, and then we’re just playing the waiting game. The other frustrating part is like today it’s sunny and gorgeous out and yesterday was sunny out but there was rain coming. I think a lot of people don’t understand the big picture, all the moving parts to rescheduling games. But, there is feel good success when you get all the games played.

     R: How do you try and dry the field?

     MH: So we try to get brooms and brush it off, and then we’ll get bags of sand and bags of turface and try to fill it up which soaks up the water. But we don’t want to impact the grass so we can’t put a lot down, so it’s really just trying to get areas dry as quickly as we can.

     R: Assuming the rain holds off, how long do you expect it to take for the field to be playable again? 

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Games Postponed Due to Flooding, Damage on New Field

     MH: Monday [Oct. 1] I hope, today is Friday [Sept. 28], we have no games today, no games tomorrow, obviously nothing Sunday, so hopefully we can play on Monday. It’s just we haven’t had any hot days either that can soak up some of the water, so that’s the problem. It’s rained literally every day, it’s just like your backyard, your backyard is soaked right? So, that’s what the field is like. People think there’s some like, contraption. There are drains under the field but it’s still soaked, so we don’t want to put any players safety on the line.