Karsten Blackwelder has his back turned to the Saturday morning sun that’s still hugging the eastern horizon.

Shattered glass lies at his feet.

With a broom in one hand and a shovel in the other, Karsten sweeps up fragments onto the brown spade, then into the five-gallon bucket sitting nearby.

“We do everything,” Karsten says before loading the bucket into the bed of his Gator (a golf cart with a miniature pickup bed in back in lieu of the place for golf bags).

“And that’s why you see me doing this stuff: sweeping glass.”

His Gator whizzes out of the parking lot east of the Jacobson Building and drives toward Jack Trice Field, currently under frost, which is in turn under long-casted shadows, and already, out of view.

Karsten stops his Gator at the shop – the grounds-crew shop, which is tucked below Jacobson’s offices and tucked behind the north end zone bleachers.

Karsten is one of six college students working for the ISU grounds crew today.

He got here at 6:50 this morning. It’s still minutes before 8 a.m. – some five hours left before Kansas State takes the field looking for its fourth win of the season against Iowa State.

Long days, these game days.

Karsten’s lucky if he heads home before 7 p.m.

He spends sometimes 35 hours a week working around Jack Trice Stadium.

State law says 20 hours is all he can work so 20 hours is all he’s paid for.

Karsten doesn’t mind.

“It’s more of like a sense of pride watching the game on the field you worked so hard to get ready,” he says.

Mike Andresen is Iowa State’s turf manager and his graying hair is still wet.

Maybe because there’s so much of it.

It’s a full head of hair, swept back by hands. The varying shades of gray fall all over his shoulders. It nearly forms an outline for his tanned face.

Mike is 42, and his waistline reflects it. His height hovers somewhere over 6″0. The height helps to stretch out his stoutness.

“Why don’t you guys put up the nets, and then we’ll go ahead and put that fencing up,” he says to Karsten and the small group of ground crewers around him.

Mike spots either Travis or Kevin Doyle (the identical twins are hard to tell apart) and it begins.

“I was out there working while you were sitting in there eating donuts,” the 15-year old twin says.

“Yeah, but I’m an old man,” Mike answers.

“All that money you’re making, you should be working,” the twin says.

Fifty-three thousand dollars is Mike’s yearly income.

The twins aren’t paid anything. They’re the sons of Dick Doyle, who is the systems control technician for Jack Trice. The twins like to drive Gators around on Saturday. They like to rib Mike.

Four of the six college guys are paid between $6.35 and $6.75 an hour.

The two interns are paid $750 a month.

Ryan Newman and Nate Horne are the two interns.

They paint the field during the week with equipment that shoots out the various colors like water from a hose. It hisses as the paint hits the grass.

End zones and the bordered sidelines are painted Wednesday; lines, hash marks and numbers are done on Thursday.

It’s more than painting though.

If the grass is growing, and now it isn’t, the grounds crew will mow it. They also clean and restock the stadium bathrooms on Monday and Tuesday – a job few people want.

Friday, the trash the wind brings to the field is picked up. Jack Trice is mowed after practice. And then, the mowers are sprayed down and everything around the shop is cleaned up.

This for a field on Saturday shorn of anything second-rate.

The field is glistening, despite the dew that has yet to burn off.

It looks . cleaned.

It’s more than aesthetics for Mike.

“When we watch games on Saturdays and Sundays, we watch them differently,” he says. “Good fields allow the better players to become superior players over the rest of them. It will allow the best players to shine. Whereas a sloppy field – it kinds of evens everybody out.”

In a few hours, Mike will look for precise cuts made at full speed – the true test of good turf.

Brody Benton is nowhere near the field at 8:30. He’s riding his Gator over to the one of the four practice fields – and not happy about it.

He’s been assigned by some event staff guys – some of the seemingly thousands of people running around this morning – to pick up wooden tables by a sand lot sitting next to the field.

“We do all their shit work and their little bitch things,” he says.

“We’re not just turf managers. We’re site managers,” Mike says a bit later.

And it’s true.

Already this morning, glass has been swept from parking lots; fences have been assembled on sidewalks and around the entrance of the press box elevator.

And now wooden tables are loaded haphazardly into a pickup truck and shipped to the north parking lot where they are arranged for beer-drinking alumni.

The soccer field and softball field and baseball field and track facilities are also groomed by the grounds crew.

By 8:40a.m., Brody’s eating a donut in the shop.

Too cold to load stupid tables, he reasons.

“I am pissed,” says Ryan, the intern. “Where’s my cherry donuts? I had the lady put in four cherry donuts for a reason.”

Ryan and Nate, the other intern, appeared on the front page of the Ames Tribune earlier this week. They were painting the field.

Any time anyone from the grounds crew is seen anywhere but in the sports section, that person(s) has to buy donuts for all on Saturday.

Ryan grabs one of three remaining donuts, not cherry, and fifteen minutes later, Mike the manager, says to Ryan and Nate: “We’re going to decide if we’re going to mow yet.”

“Here comes our job list,” Ryan says to Nate as Mike returns to the shop minutes later.

“Yeah, let’s mow it,” Mike says.

Ryan and Nate grab their headphones.

On game day, one-eighth of an inch is mowed, tops. “Basically we’ll just be mowing some paint,” Nate says.

Karsten and Tim Doyle, older brother of the twins, son of Dick, could watch Ryan and Nate mow.

But they don’t.

Karsten and Tim are on Jacobson’s veranda, which overlooks the field, not watching, but instead, draping red cloth around the scaffolding the play clock sits on.

A play clock can’t sit on a rusting hunk of metal during the game. The thing a play clock sits on, so the players can see it, must be pleasant, refined.

With delicacy, as if the cloth might crumble, Karsten and Tim wrap it around the scaffolding using industrial bungee cords and duct tape to secure it.

“Our major is turf management, but we need some interior decorating,” Karsten says.

By 10 o’clock, cloth hides the scaffolding, mowers dry from their post-mow bath, and the guys are laying the tarp that players and coaches on the sidelines will pace across.

“Did you see Monday Night?” Ryan says, referring to the Steelers-Titans game. “Their sideline tarp has so many bubbles in it. I couldn’t believe it.”

The tarp stretches from one 30-yard line to the other. It’s unrolled and then pins are driven into the turf by hand when wrinkles are flattened.

“I feel a good one coming on today boys,” Ryan says.

Kansas State’s tarp is finished first. Tyson Miller, another grounds crewer, walks across the field.

“Walk on the light, Tyson,” Tim Doyle says.

“Sorry,” Tyson answers.

From either sideline, the field is split into increments of five yards of darker grass and five yards of lighter grass.

If you walk on the darker grass, you walk against the grain of it. Leaves footprints.

“It’s basically an obsession for turf grass people,” Brody says.

After the other tarp is devoid of wrinkles and football games are discussed, (“A&M, Tech,” Ryan says, “Ought to be a good old fashioned shit fight.”) the sod in the shop, with added fertilizer, must be colored green.

That way, when it’s applied, the field won’t look as chunky, and Joe Fan-with-a-good-seat is none the wiser.

Ryan, Nate and Mike turn the sod around and through and over the added food coloring.

Five guys stand around watching.

“Green dye,” Tim Doyle says, shaking his head. “Welcome to the Masters.”