On warm, sunny afternoons and cool, moon-lit evenings throughout the year, athletes take to Mesa College’s athletic fields with victory on their minds. But unlike the outcomes of their games, one thing is for sure – the fields will be ready thanks to O.J. Romo and his fellow groundskeepers.
Romo, a native San Diegan, began working for the San Diego Community District as a gardener at City College in 1975. He was just the second person to hold the position at the school, which meant a lot of freedom to create the job as he went.
“It was nice,” Romo said about those early years. “Back then nobody else knew what we were supposed to be doing.”
Eventually, after several years at City, and a few years off caring for his two young children at the time, Romo made the move to Mesa as an athletic groundskeeper. His main duty at Mesa is to paint the indispensable lines on the baseball, football and soccer fields each game day, but he says that his work is much more than that.
“My true value is keeping things running,” said Romo, half jokingly. “There’s always something to fix around here.”
Romo jokes that his nickname among the grounds crew is “Mr. 10/90” because he says he does 10 percent of the work and gets 90 percent of the credit. Even though the nickname is an exaggeration, he is quick to point out that he wouldn’t have any fields to paint if it weren’t for the help of his co-workers who mow and care for the three Mesa fields daily.
He has great respect for Director of Plant Operations Rick Covert and Irrigation Technician Wayne Koppel as well as all of the workers who help keep Mesa’s athletic fields in top condition year-round.
“The way I see it, I’m an artist,” Romo said with a laugh. “They get my canvas ready and I come and paint it.”
And paint it he does. Rain or shine, sweltering heat or bitter cold, Romo pushes his 250-pound paint rig over hundreds of yards of turf, laying down countless gallons of white paint several days a week, all before many students get out of bed in the morning.
Although Romo is an expert at his craft, and the fields are painted flawlessly more often than not, he admits that he is far from exempt from making mistakes. He says he has painted numbers on the wrong lines on the football field on more than one occasion. Once he even painted the threes upside down without realizing it until he had finished every one.
“Everybody remembers when you screw up,” he said. “They forget about all the times that the field looks perfect. That’s okay; all you can do when screw up is laugh at it. If you can’t do that you’re in trouble.”
So why would a person get up before the sun rises day after day for 31 years, just to go to work and lug a 250-pound piece of machinery around in any type of weather imaginable, in hopes of not making a mistaking the public will see? Romo has an easy answer to that question.
“As long as you’re happy doing what you’re doing, that’s all matters,” he said.