MiraCosta College is a community college located in California, known for their highly successful transfer rates, degrees, career planning, and skill building. The students at MiraCosta rave about their professors and the personal attention they receive, both in the class, but also through extracurricular activities.
THE CHALLENGE
To offer the best for their Spartans, the staff at MiraCosta strive to maintain the main athletic field of their campus in excellent condition. However, the process of manual marking proved to be laborious, creating a lot of time pressure for the grounds crew.
THE SOLUTION
The college started investigating alternatives, and so in the winter of 2022 they decided to adopt robotic line marking solutions and brought on board a Turf Tank robot.
Considerable savings
Wendell Fullwood is the District Ground Supervisor for MiraCosta College, who supervises the sports fields landscape. When asked how they got the Turf Tank on their team, Wendell explains it started with a lot of skepticism:
“Originally I saw the robot and we thought it was more of an interesting thing to have. We looked at it and weren’t really sure how that would work. But a few years went by, and we were having issues with the amount of time it takes to our crew to string the field.”
But with the workload and time pressure that started to accumulate in time, they decided to give the robot a second chance. So they arranged a demo to see the robot live on their fields, and that’s when they realized the true benefits of having a Turf Tank:
The robot basically sold itself. It performed exceptionally. It was very impressive.
Wendell Fullwood, District Ground Supervisor
But apart from the initial impression of the accuracy, they sat down and compared the numbers, and realized what huge savings the robot could bring.
Painting 3 soccer fields
| Manual marking |
| 16 man-hours |
| Turf Tank |
| Less than 4 hours just the robot painting |
“We thought about the time savings after seeing the demo. We realized basically we could, in the first year, way more than recoup any discomfort just for the labor portion. Just for paying somebody to have to stripe the field.”
Wendell is happy they decided to go the autonomous road, as the robot proved to be a real asset to their team, which completely transformed the way they painted their fields.
We’ve saved thousands of dollars on paint alone.
Wendell Fullwood, District Ground Supervisor
Effortless line marking
For their main field they have the largest regulation size international soccer field. And at the two ends of the field they added two practice fields.
Jeff Jones is one of the Gardener Groundskeepers at MiraCosta College, who uses the robot to paint the campus’ soccer field. He chips into the story and draws a comparison in the time he needed in the past to paint the field versus now, with the robot.
It saved us a ton of time. With the robot, I could paint all three of these fields in less than four hours. Easy.
Jeff Jones Gardener Groundskeeper
“I used to have to string this field myself. It took me two days, from having to measure this and find the center and, you know, put all the marks down and then string it. And then on top of that, we’d have to staple the string down because of the depressions in the field.”
| Past |
| Strings & manual measurements |
| Time wasted on cleaning the machine |
| Turf Tank |
| 2-minutes setup in the tablet |
| 5-minutes flush with water |
Not only can they finish the field in record time, but the process itself is much easier.
Vincente Hernandez, the Lead Groundskeeper for Miracosta College Grounds Department paints a fuller picture on the challenges they had to face in the past when they painted the fields manually. He is delighted that his crew now has a robot to assist them, washing all those troubles away!
It’s labor intensive to do this. The stripe, the layout, measuring and laying out a field. With the robot, you can pretty much just put the coordinates in the tablet and pretty much the Turf Tank does all the work.
Vincente Hernandez, Lead Groundskeeper
The cleaning of the equipment at the end of the day is an aspect we often overlook, but even though we don’t realize it, it also takes up a considerable amount of time, which could be better spent in other ways. Jeff points out at the ease of this process compared to other machines they used in the past.
“As far as cleaning, it’s a lot quicker than our other sprayers that we had. We have a little jug with water in it, we just flush it out.“
We’ve had other painters. None of them are even comparable with the ease of which the robot does the field.
Wendell Fullwood, District Ground Supervisor
Professional quality
Justin, the other Gardener Groundskeeper for the college points out another important advantage with the Turf Tank robot.
As the college has only one soccer field on its campus, it proved difficult to get it ready, while the team also needed it for practice.
“The season prior to getting the Turf Tank, since we had reduced to one field, getting the time to actually string it, was not working. We would string it the day before and then paint the following day. But with one field, the team wanted to be down here practicing. And we even had an instance where my coworker prepared the whole field by stringing it. And we found out they were planning to practice and it had to be pulled up, which was not very fun.”
“Because we couldn’t string it, the slightest little variation on using a normal painter, over a few weeks of trying to match up lines, it could become a big variation. It didn’t look very good for us. And we couldn’t really help it with the time we had.”
But now, they do not have to worry anymore about the lines. Due to the robot’s GPS technology they can have perfectly straight lines, without strings or manual measurements, every time!
The lines are always pretty consistent.
Justin, Gardener Groundskeeper
That robot paints a nice straight line. We couldn’t even match what it does, and it does it perfectly, really.
Jeff Jones, Gardener Groundskeeper
Conclusion
MiraCosta College’s Grounds Department is more than satisfied with its purchase of the Turf Tank robot. Not only does it decrease the labor involved in painting fields, but it also provides consistent professional quality lines for their soccer field. The groundkeepers no longer have to worry about having enough time or resources to get their field ready before games, but can offer their Spartans the perfect place to train their skills.
