By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
           
As part of the golf turf industry during a boon time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Todaro saw probably 50 courses built throughout Oklahoma and Texas, "which is unheard of," he said.
           
"But, it was always from the outside as a consultant or irrigation designer or in sales or something."
           
At the Billy W. Williams Golf Practice Facility, though, Todaro was part of turning a former landfill into a beautiful 16 ½-acre green oasis in a matter of months.
           
"All that dirt input, all the irrigation, all of the drainage, everything that went into that facility," Baylor men's golf coach Mike McGraw said, "Joe was there from Day 1. He knows, intimately, every square inch of the place."
           
It was, and is, a labor of love for Todaro.

A Waco native and 1987 graduate of Lorena High School, Joe returned to Baylor to earn a religion degree in 2006, and has been a Baylor fan for as long as he can remember.
           
"What I was really excited about is that we weren't going to just push some dirt around and mow the grass close," he said. "It was done as real golf should be. All the features are built like you would build a golf course. And that's a huge deal in how they perform, because you can't just take your yard and mow it down close and it be a golf green."
           
Designed by Chet Williams, who was the longtime lead designer for golfing legend Jack Nicklaus, the Billy W. Williams facility includes a short-game and two putting greens, seven target greens and four separate tee areas.


           
"He's done Whispering Pines, which is the No. 1 golf course in Texas (and No. 54 nationally)," Todaro said of Williams, a 1983 Baylor graduate. "And it's not just here's a green and here's a tee. He imagines the contours and all of that. Then, we talk about it. And I'll tell him, "Chet, I can't maintain that, you've got to back off that.' So, it's a back and forth, but certainly his creative genius and me just working at getting it done."
           
Originally hired at Baylor as an Associate Director of Facilities and Operations in January 2016, Joe is now the Director of Athletics Turf Management.
           
Even with all his various stops in the industry, from being an assistant greenskeeper at Hackberry Creek Country Club to working as an irrigation specialist, designer and salesman for Toro, Joe said it was still special seeing the golf practice facility built from beginning to end.
           
"You just have to have faith that it will actually happen," he said. "In all those golf courses, I know what it started as. But, when you're at the helm, and it turns from the dirt that was here, to a little bit better quality dirt, to now we put grass on it and somebody is spending money for you to turn this into something . . . it's kind of pressure. I can take over a golf course that was already built and do great. But now, I've got to get it to this first and then maintain it.
           
"So, I was probably a little anxious, excited, all at the same time, that it turns out like it's supposed to turn out. You just do the things you're supposed to do and have faith that it will all work out."

Growing up in Waco, he remembers going to Baylor games with his dad, Bill, who still works the games for Rhino and helps out at the golf practice facility a couple days a week. Married to his high school sweetheart, Traci, in 1990, Joe got a turf management degree from TSTC in 1993 "and the career kind of took off from there."
           
His one and only respite from the turf industry came when Joe returned to finish his religion degree at Baylor and helped start Journey Christian Community in China Spring, serving as its first associate pastor.
           
"It was myself and Rick Cobb. There were six of us that met for the first time in Rick's living room," Joe said. "I felt like we had a calling, and it was a great experience, but you've got to be a special person to do that for a living. The new church is always challenging, because you have all these things you pray for. They bring it, and then God says, 'OK, here are all the unchurched people.' And you're like, 'Wow! We've got to really do church.' I worked with the youth, connection, a little bit of everything."
           
Joe returned to his TSTC roots in 2012 as department chair and got a call one day from Henry Howard, Baylor's Associate AD for Athletics Event Management & Facilities. Howard wanted to see if there were some TSTC students that might be interested in helping out with the upkeep and maintenance of the Bill and Roberta Bailey Golf Center at Twin Rivers, which served as Baylor golf's home until the new facility was completed in January 2017.
           
"I told him, 'No, but I might be interested,''' Joe said. "I was just kind of looking down the road. And that's really how that relationship started, and it just went from there. (Former men's golf coach Greg Priest) was really the only one that was working on it, and that's hard to do the day-in, day-out thing and still coach. You just can't keep up with all of it."
           
That part-time gig led to the full-time job in January 2016, when Joe took on the at-times challenging project of what became the golf practice facility, which is located just off University Parks Drive, east of La Salle Avenue and next to the Willis Family Equestrian Center.
           
"With all of the Baylor connections, it was special to see and really amazing," Joe said, "because I had my doubts of what this thing would end up looking like with all the trash I saw. It was just not a pretty piece of land. I just thought I was going to be picking up trash forever. But now, it looks immaculate. The process was pretty cool."
           
The work certainly didn't end that day in January 2017, when the Baylor men's and women's golfers took their first practice shots at the new facility. It's an everyday, all-seasons thing to keep it looking immaculate.
           
Simply coming up with an operations system was a challenge all by itself, Joe said, because "when you show up at a golf course, they've got a shop, they've got all the equipment, and you just kind of get out of the guys' way."
           
"Here, we had to do it from the ground up," he said. "What mowers do we need? Where are we going to keep them? How are we going to work on them? Who's going to run them? And we've gotten pretty fortunate with the guys working here. Those three have been with us for a while, so they're really what makes it work. I just kind of fill in as needed."
           
And just like you can't turn your yard into a golf green just by mowing it close, there's a lot more to the upkeep of the golf practice facility than mowing the grass every day.


           
It does include mowing, but it's also verticutting, topdressing and airifying, "in all types and fashions," Joe said. Currently, the mowers are set to cut the grass at 0.085 inches, or less than a tenth of an inch.
           
"That's really low, so you don't have any room for error on a mower," he said. "Any imperfection in a blade, you see immediately, and we can see it. I'll see it, and hopefully nobody else sees it. But, that's what you get. You put a little bit of sand down, it ruins the cut on a mower, and you have to start all over again the next day."
           
It also involves fertilization and watering and then reacting to "what the weather does to you, or prepare for it if you can in advance."
           
"Basically, when the grass is growing, you help it grow as fast as it can, as hard as it can," Joe said. "And then we use the summer to kind of recuperate. Because then, when the season hits, we start getting everything lower, we start pushing it to get it to perform for what both teams need when they get to a tournament.
           
"Toward the end of the fall, we start getting ready for the spring, because they start in January, but there's nothing growing in January. Not even a cool-season grass grows in January. So, you have to get all that established before it turns cold, so that when they get here it starts performing. As it warms up, of course, everything gets better. But, you start getting ready for the change of the season a month or two months before it happens, so that they don't have any down time and the conditions are what they need them to be."

McGraw said it's a "great marriage to have a Baylor guy there who knows what he's doing."
           
In addition to his responsibilities with the golf and equestrian programs, Joe oversees the parking for football games at McLane Stadium.
           
"As far as our department (event management & facilities), football is an all-hands-on-deck type thing," he said. "I don't design (the traffic flow), I just have this 80-page book and make sure that our vendors are setting it up like it needs to be set up. I'm kind of just a problem-solver on game day."
           
Since he's otherwise isolated in handling things at the golf facility and equestrian center, Joe said supervising the McLane Stadium parking is a "nice way to know people west of La Salle."
           
"It's been interesting to find out, especially in event management, everything that goes into," he said. "As a Baylor fan, I had absolutely no idea of all the moving parts involved. To see that has been crazy, has been eye-opening, has been fun to be a part of, but has also been challenging. It's just really been eye-opening to see what goes into running an athletics department, because I don't think your average fan has absolutely any idea. I know I didn't, and I was an avid fan."
           
Yes, he was. In the fall of 2015, the semester before he officially started at Baylor, Joe and his then 9-year-old son, Camden, traveled to every game that season and finished up at the Russell Athletic Bowl in Orlando.
           
"The times that we spent in the car were probably some of the coolest times," he said. "It was low-budget. We would just drive and find a hotel when we got there. Of course, we did pick the year we didn't go to West Virginia. We would take a picture with the scoreboard after every game, and Camden's face when we lost that first game (44-34 to 12th-ranked Oklahoma), you've never seen such total misery."
           
Joe and his wife, Traci, also have a 26-year-old daughter, Mandi, who just graduated from nursing school; and a 20-year-old daughter, Shelbi, who is the feeding manager at the equestrian center and studying to be a veterinarian tech.Traci is a 1991 Baylor graduate and has worked in University Development for the last 12 years. 
                       
Although he's been in the business for most of his adult life, Joe confesses that he isn't a very good golfer.
           
"I'm a golf professional, but not from playing it," he said. "I play a few scrambles here and there. I'd like to play more. I think probably all of us golfers would like to play more golf."
           
If only he could find a place to practice, Joe says, with a sly grin. If only.