St. Aloysius’ run to the Class 1A football championship this Friday in Starkville took hundreds of hours of practice, 579 points scored and more than four and a half miles of paint.

Yes, paint. You didn’t think those perfectly straight white lines on the field magically appeared each week? Without paint, there’s no grid on the gridiron. Absent of lines, the football field might as well be a cow pasture.

The paint and Russ Nelson, the coach who applies it to the field before every home game, are perhaps the unsung heroes of the Flashes’ 15-1 season.

“He gets out here and does a lot of it on his own,” St. Al head coach BJ Smithhart said of Nelson’s work. “He does most of the painting, probably 95 percent of it.”

Nelson estimates he spends three or four hours a week preparing and pushing a paint sprayer along the 1,350.5 yards of straight lines that must be painted before every home game. Over the course of the regular season and playoffs, that adds up to about 4.6 miles of paint.

“Some schools have other people come paint the field. This makes it more ours,” Nelson said.

The sprayer helps out immensely.

“It’s one of the best things we’ve bought,” Nelson said of the machine that connects to 5-gallon buckets of paint. “It lasts a lot longer than aerosol paint.”

Each week, it takes about 20 gallons of paint to finish lining the field, Nelson said.

“It’s not too bad,” Nelson said.

St. Al uses World Class Athletic Surfaces paint, which is manufactured in Leland. It’s the same paint used by top college programs such as Alabama, LSU, and Florida State.

But even the best paint on the market wears out after a night of abuse or a week of rain. Though the lines are still visible after a game, the wear and tear of practices means a fresh coat is needed every week.

“This is where we practice too, so it gets kind of worn out,” Smithhart said.
Before Friday’s victory over Coffeeville, extra work went into the field. Soccer season has started, so goals had to be removed from each end zone and the lines had taken an extra beating.

“We don’t have turf or a separate field,” Smithart said. “In the past, the county let us use their fields for soccer, but now they charge us.”