Joel Ahern – Sports Turf Manager – Stanford Athletics
jahern@stanford.edu
In person interview with Joe Bingold and Jorge Heraud
Joel is a manager with Stanford Athletics – he also operates machinery. The conversation started a little rocky because as I was describing the business concept and technology, someone from a different division (sewer) who was at the table and listening shouted, “Hey Joel, they’re making you obsolete!!”
Joel, however, was very polite and gave good feedback about the potentials for this technology and the probable pitfalls.
He was very suspicious about the quality of the technology. He didn’t believe you could get the machine to be reliable enough to mow sports fields – especially not a baseball field which had a lot of unique elements. Even mowing a standard rectangular sports field has a lot of dynamic components. You need to be careful about walls, tracks, lines, goal posts, etc.
Joel typically mows sports fields with someone else. It takes them about 1.5 hours to mow a baseball field or rectangular sports field. About 25% of their time is spent mowing and the remainder is used on other field maintenance activities.
Joel is responsible for 52 acres of field. Joel has 4 FT workers, 3 PT workers (using man-power outsource), 1 PT irrigation worker, and 1 PT maintenance worker. They typically mow in the morning, he would prefer to mow later – but often can’t because of either field use or employees gone for the day.
The workers are unionized and salary is normally around $25/hr but can be significantly higher for those who have been working for a long time.
Joel thought that an automated vacuum machine might be a good idea for this technology – the machine would automatically follow the mower around and collect clippings.
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