McNitt is a nationally known expert on stadium turfgrass. In addition to Heinz Stadium, he has consulted on numerous golf course and athletic field construction and renovation projects and has been honored by several national organizations, including the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. He received the Founder’s Award from the National Sports Turf Managers Association in recognition of his research on athletic fields. He’s also a friend to and contact person for field managers around the Northeast, many of whom are former students.

McNitt uses a Clegg Impact Soil Tester to assess the hardness of a field at Penn State. Athletes interact with a playing field’s surface by running—and falling—on it, so the field can’t be either too hard or too soft.

McNitt studies the special demands placed on athletic field turfgrass, and he’s been using his research and industry connections to establish an athletic field emphasis in Penn State’s four-year Turfgrass Science program that he hopes will one day rival the University’s reputation in golf course management. “Last season, nine out of ten major golf tournaments were hosted on courses with Penn State graduates as superintendents,” he says. “To put it simply, my goal is to help Penn State take over the NFL and Major League Baseball as well.”

His efforts start at the grassroots level. “We study sports turf in our classes, and we place interested students in appropriate internships in the stadiums,” he says. McNitt’s placement network is large and includes groundskeepers and former students such as Keene with the Steelers, Tony Leonard with the Philadelphia Eagles, Dennis Brolin at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts, Dan Douglas with the minor league Reading Phillies, and Al Capatos, head groundskeeper at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

Capatos’ story is one that perhaps best illustrates McNitt’s influence. A native of State College, Capatos earned his bachelor’s degree in agronomy in 1997. “I was into athletic fields, but they weren’t emphasizing them back then,” he says. “So my only point of contact was Andy—I didn’t have anyone else to turn to about sports turf, the industry, and the things that interested me.”

After graduation, Capatos took a minimum-wage job as a walk-on field assistant with the Richmond Braves, a triple-A Atlanta Braves affiliate. “The sports turf business is very competitive, and I had to break in somewhere,” he says. He placated his worried parents (who wanted to see him making “a decent salary at a golf course”) and parlayed that year of fieldwork into a head groundskeeper position with the double-A Bowie Bay Sox, the Orioles’ Annapolis affiliate.

Capatos soon began handling special projects for the Orioles, including field management for the once-in-a-lifetime 1999 home-and-away series between the Orioles and a Cuban all-star team. The Cuban fields, on which Capatos spent eight days, were “the equivalent of our high school fields at best,” he says. “They were mostly weeds, and needless to say, they had no irrigation systems, thatch reduction, or fertilization. Going from Camden Yards to Cuba was like night and day.”

Al Capatos, who graduated from the college in 1997, is now head grounds-keeper for Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles.

Finally, after beefing up his averages in the minor leagues, Capatos hit his bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam, scoring the head groundskeeper position at Camden Yards—where he cares for the state-of-the-art field designed in part by his friend and former mentor, Andy McNitt. “That’s the nice thing about having studied at Penn State,” Capatos says. “Andy’s on my side and I can call him up at any time. He’ll have information about a new product or material or method. I may read about it somewhere else, but the bottom line is that I’ll talk to Andy first, because he’s tested it out or knows someone who has.”

Stadium turfgrass is McNitt’s specialty, and he has an intimate understanding of the technical differences among the various types of golf course and stadium grasses—factors like varieties, mowing heights, and root mixtures. “Baseball fields are the ideal sports turf situation,” he says. “All the high-wear areas are skinned; there are only three guys who stand on the grass; and when it rains, they stop play and tarp the field. Football’s the opposite—players are often grinding around in the snow, and the league keeps narrowing the hash marks, which concentrates play on the center of the field.”