Tennessee Turfgrass - August / September 2021

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ON

BILL MARBET OWNER OF LINE TO LINE, LLC How did you get involved in this line of work and what was your career path?

Many years ago when my two sons were playing Little League baseball, the dads had to work on the fields, and I owned a tire business here in Columbia. With us dads working on the ball fields, one thing led to another and it became a passion. Other people started to ask us, “Can you come look at our dirt?” or “Can you come look at our mound?” I had the opportunity to sell my tire business, and I told my wife that we’re going to take a huge leap of faith and chase the passion. In 1996 we started Southern Athletic Fields and grew that until 2018, when we sold SAF to Profile Products. Since then I’ve done a little for them, but now we’ve branched out and started a couple other companies. We have Game Time Sports Fields, it’s renovation, grading, whatever needs to be done on an athletic field, we try to do it. Then Line to Line is accessory based – netting and painting, bases, drags, all the other things that I enjoy doing.

Bill Marbet

We’re trying to reinvent the wheel and come up with new, and maybe sometimes better, ideas on how to maintain baseball and softball fields. Have you always primarily worked in baseball and softball, or have you ventured into other sports?

We painted and striped football and soccer fields, we’ve done a lot of topdressing and grading of football and soccer fields. So we’re not just baseball and softball, but I think most people know me as “The Dirt Guy,” so that’s kind of where we’ve had our home. Do you do a lot of turfgrass maintenance, or do you rely on someone else to work with you while you’re doing dirt work? We have some partners that do most of the turf part of it. We have tried over the years to specialize in the ballfield dirts, mound clays, and the particular types of infield mixes. We’ve been very fortunate from the Little Leagues to high school to colleges to Major League fields to have our particular type of infield mix. Some people call you the “King of Dirt.” How did you earn that title? Well, that was not my idea. I think there’s one reason they call me that, no one else ever wanted to be tagged with that label. We’ve always said, it’s not just dirt. There’s a lot more to it. From the beginning when we’d just find something that was kind of red that would work on a ballfield, and we’d begin to understand what made this particular blend work. So we started getting into the differences between sand, silt and clay. We started looking at the different components of dirt and we started looking at the percentages of sand, the percentages of silt, the percentages of clay.

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TENNESSEE TURFGRASS AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2021 Email TTA at: info@ttaonline.org