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Lynda McCausland calls it her miracle game.

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Lynda McCausland calls it her miracle game.

The Bombers were set to host the Montreal Alouettes in a Week 18 matchup at IG Field on Thanksgiving weekend in 2019.

Earlier that week, McCausland, who was in her first full season as stadium operations supervisor, and her small crew of part-time workers had prepared the field as they had done all season.

PHOTOS BY RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

IG Field operations manager Lynda McCausland is responsible for painting and removing lines on IG Field for Blue Bombers and Valour FC games.

The turf was ready for the late-season action until Mother Nature decided it wasn’t.

Three days before the game, Winnipeg endured one of the most memorable storms in recent memory. Freezing rain, wind gust upwards of 80 km/h and 35 cm of snow dumped across town, which would cost the City an estimated $10 million to clean up.

While much of Winnipeg shut down for a few days, there was still a game to be played on the weekend. Snow graders were called to clear the field, but to McCausland’s dismay, they cleared more than that.

With each pass, she watched the machines scrape her fresh coat of paint off the turf, leaving her with a blank canvas and roughly 24 hours until game time.

With no other option, McCausland pulled an overnighter underneath a heated tarp, re-painting each yard line, hashmark and logo at IG Field in time for the game.

“We did pull it off, surprisingly, but it was close. The closest one yet and I’ve never painted so fast,” McCausland said.

McCausland and her crew are something of unsung heroes in Winnipeg’s event world, preparing the field for two professional sports teams (Bombers and Valour FC) while also catering to other events hosted at IG Field such as the U of M Bisons and high school football games, and field rentals for smaller affairs.

Among other things, it’s a job that requires supreme time management and efficiency, as the group is often in a race against the clock. It’s a countdown to the next event or whatever wrench Mother Nature tries to throw in their plans.

“You constantly watch the weather,” McCausland said. “And if it means I get up and come in the middle of the night and start painting, it’s just being flexible and adaptable to make it work.”

McCausland, a Regina native who moved to Winnipeg in 1995, will tell you things have got much easier since taking over at the end of the Bombers’ 2018 season.

She used to be the only full-time employee handling field operations. Although she supplemented some duties with part-time help, she remained the only person who could paint the field.

A top priority during those times were the nine sponsors’ logos, which McCausland estimates would take a full day to paint. She would have to return on a separate day to lay the other field markings.

Not only are the sponsors’ logos now digitally placed on the sideline and on broadcasts, but McCausland also has two full-timers at her disposal, who can remove paint and help her lay a fresh coat.

Austin Geirnaert has worked under McCausland for a year as a stadium operations assistant.

Geirnaert, 19, looks after anything that involves converting the field from one event to the next, including painting, assembling and anchoring nets and goalposts and preparing bench areas.

His schedule ranges throughout the summer. He could start removing paint after a Valour game at 6 p.m. and end around 2:30 a.m. before returning to the stadium at noon to help paint a new football field for the Bombers.

“We know at the end of the day that the next event has to happen. So really, we work around any of our tasks. And it’s that reliance on that we’re not just one person and relying on the rest of the team to be able to complete these turnovers,” he said.

Geirnaert is typically one of two people removing or laying paint, and one of six preparing other facets of the field.

Removing paint from the turf following a soccer game will usually take around eight hours. For football, that removal takes upwards of 32 hours, which requires two shifts.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

That’s ahead of the three hours it takes to assemble and anchor both goalposts and upwards of seven hours it takes to re-paint the field.

It can make things tough on weeks like this, when the Bombers host the Stampeders on Thursday night and Valour hosts Pacific FC on Sunday afternoon.

“We’ve got some tight turnarounds in which we rely on actually getting the work done, but if it’s not done then we can’t progress,” Geirnaert said.

“There definitely are some difficulties which come in, not even pertaining to personal fatigue, but which may still cause frustration or strain, say weather or equipment. We have to work around those factors and hope that our machines are running and that the weather is going to cooperate.”

McCausland said Winnipeg’s historically wet spring didn’t wash away any of her work this year, but that there were several occasions when she had to alter her schedule to navigate each downpour.

“I have a very short window sometimes where I have time to paint. So if mother nature throws some elements at me, it really puts a twist on when I can get out there,” she said.

To watch the crew at work is something attending a symphony orchestra.

With limited time at their disposal, the crew must be efficient without being careless. When McCausland is done painting a quarter of the lines, she’ll signal to the “hashmark team” to begin filling in the middle of the field.

“We’re always trying to be one or two steps ahead of each other so there’s no stopping,” she said.

The crew will have yet another hurdle this fall when the Bisons’ football season ramps up.

While the field dimensions for university football are the same as those in the CFL, the pro league opted to change their hash marks this season, moving them from 17 yards to nine yards apart.

There will be a time in September when McCausland and her crew will convert from a Bombers game to a Bisons game to a Valour game in the same week, a week in which they surely hope doesn’t feature rain.

“We’ll make it work. We always do,” she said. “But it’s just seeing what works best in that situation, because that’s just yet another little piece that has to play into it all.”

“I always say it’s one team, one dream. We’re not just individuals who make this team successful, it takes all of us to pull it off.”

Updated on Tuesday, August 23, 2022 12:30 PM CDT: info updated