Reno Aces boasts the best field in professional baseball.
Message In A Bottle
When she reached out to the Arizona Diamondbacks via their online comments and questions form, asking about the possibility of shadowing the team’s head groundskeeper, high school senior Leah Withrow had zero expectations. It was truly a shot in the dark, with no guarantee that her request would be received, much less read or considered.
Fast forward 10 years to Reno, NV, where she is currently the award-winning head groundskeeper at Greater Nevada Field, home of the Diamondbacks Triple-A Reno Aces. It’s a job she has held since 2021, after working her way up from internships to assistant of field operations.
In 2022, her field earned the prestigious honor of being named Professional Baseball Field of the Year by the Sports Field Management Association (SFMA).
Leah is one of an elite group of only four female head groundskeepers in professional baseball (two each in MLB and MiLB) and, at 28, the youngest to hold the position in Triple-A, the highest level of minor league competition.
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Her remarkable journey began when she discovered a sports turfgrass management program at North Dakota State University (NDSU). It appealed to her skills in science, chemistry, and biology, plus her interest in working outside the stuffy confines of an office. Before committing to the program, however, she wisely wanted to learn more.
“To be able to talk to an industry professional who does it day-to-day would be my selling point whether I wanted to do it or not,” recalls the Gardnerville, NV native.
Surprisingly, Diamondbacks head groundskeeper Grant Trenbeath responded with an invitation to spend a couple of days at Chase Field as part of his grounds crew for a non-gameday followed by a gameday.
So she headed to Phoenix for spring break and two days on the field.
“My dad dropped me off at the stadium, they gave me a badge to work, and Grant gave me a uniform and just took me under his wing.”
She is still somewhat astonished by the welcome she received and the variety of real-world tasks she had the opportunity to take on, including mowing the grass patch and painting the “A” behind home plate, working on the mound and in the bullpens, and even washing wall pads.
“He just fully immersed me into the crew and it was one of the coolest experiences. I left that first day and was exhausted. I didn't realize how much work it was but I wanted to go back the next day, it didn't matter how tired I was. I knew if I was that excited to go back that this is probably something I should do.”
Trenbeath, entering his 27th year with the Diamondbacks, remains impressed to this day by the teenager’s enthusiasm and work ethic.
“We tried to throw as much stuff at her as possible so she could get the best feeling for the work, because people don’t know what goes on behind the scenes,” he said. “She was a willing participant in anything we asked of her, and you could definitely tell she had a passion for it.”
He added, “The seed was already planted, but maybe we gave her a little fertilizer and water.”
A Field Of Her Own
After earning a BS in sports turfgrass management from NDSU, with minors in horticulture, crop science and business administration, Leah chose to work in baseball rather than football or soccer. Frankly, she wanted to do more than grow grass, and the unique field challenges of baseball appealed to her.
She explains, “In baseball, you have all these different surfaces to maintain. The warning track surface is different than the infield surface, that's different than the mound clay, that's different than the grass that surrounds it all. Plus, there’s our landscape areas, our front yard and seating berm.”
Picture tons of infield and warning track dirt, plus 100 tons of sand, and top dressing three times a year. That doesn’t even begin to cover grass and maintenance.
Controlling those aspects is just one of her challenges. Managing people, she found, can be more trying than managing her field.
“Turf doesn’t talk back,” she jokes.
Becoming an effective manager has been a process. Her staff consists of two, year-round full-time assistants, summer interns, and a rotating crew of 15-20 part-time gameday workers.
If there is any doubt that she is among the new generation of managers, consider her expertise in utilizing social media as a remarkably successful recruitment tool. When the baseball season was canceled during the pandemic, she began posting videos on TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), simply showing what she and her staff were working on. It was a savvy marketing strategy.
“I just kind of sank my teeth into what the kids were doing,” she explains. “And if this is how they communicate and this is what they're looking at constantly, why not use that to my advantage and market to those people? It ended up working because I was speaking their language. They were visually seeing what we were doing every day and so they could visually see themselves doing it.”
Being the boss, however, also brings challenges.
“My biggest transition when I went from being the assistant to the head groundskeeper was learning my management style, learning what I liked and didn't like from previous bosses, and learning how to manage up. Because I was also dealing with now reporting to the GM, the CEO and our president, and having to communicate my needs in their language, which is numbers and figures and bottom line.”
Other stakeholders with expectations to be met include players, coaches, umpires and staff, all of whom have individual and sometimes conflicting needs.
In addition to 75 home games, Greater Nevada Field hosts weddings, parties, concerts, funerals and other special events throughout the year. No groundskeeper is fond of turning the field over to non-baseball events, but as Leah explains, “I think there's an understanding that the stadium has to make money. And I know my salary, my budget, my staff salary and their potential raises are based on how much money we can make. And if the stadium’s dark, we're not making money.”
Her escape from the “noise” is to hop on the John Deere, put in a podcast and mow for a couple of hours. No emails, no messages, no phone calls, just pure concentration on making straight lines.
Reno’s climate can present unpredictable and uncontrollable tests, with temperatures ranging from 20 to 90 degrees, accompanied by sun, snow or showers. A self-described weather nerd, Leah constantly checks her weather app and prides herself on knowing exactly what time you’ll need to go sweater and hat, or sleeveless and halter.
Snow either the day before or on opening day has become an unfortunate tradition.
“If you have any sage and want to sage the place for me that would be great because we have a curse in the stadium right now,” she says ruefully, but at the same time confident her crew is prepared to deal with anything Mother Nature sends their way.
This is Part 1 of a 2-Part series on Leah Withrow.
