Cleanup ongoing at Finley

Standing in the west end zone at Finley Stadium on Thursday, Will Healy looked down and smiled. Still painted on the green artificial turf, beneath a lighter shade of green paint, was a reminder of one of his most special moments.

The word "Spiders" is easily read on the turf, as is "Grizzlies" in the east end zone. The school nicknames were painted a few days before the Dec. 19 FCS national championship game.

"It's still pretty cool to come around and see it because of the memories it brings back," said Healy, a team captain and backup quarterback for the national champion Richmond Spiders and now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga quarterbacks coach.

Two months from today, UTC will open its season against Glenville State. Workers had pressure washers going Thursday as they cleaned the outside the stadium, and much work will be done on the field in the weeks ahead.

Stadium Corp. president Merrill Eckstein said there hadn't been a pressing need to have the paint removed until now. He said the stadium has a cleaning agent designed to remove the paint from the field, but he needed to contact the turf manufacturer, TenCate, to find out how it is used.

In addition to cleaning the field and then painting Chattanooga in both end zones and the "C" at the 50-yard line, Eckstein said the field -- specifically the sand underneath -- needed to be smoothed out to remove numerous bumps and depressions that have developed.

Eckstein said he has deliberately waited to have the field worked on because the Chattanooga Football Club soccer team has been using it since April. Saturday is the team's last home game, and once Chattanooga FC's season is complete the gold soccer lines can be removed along with the paint in the end zones.

"We'll do all that at the same time under the instruction of the TenCate people so that we'll know that we're doing the right thing," Eckstein said.

The field also is being used this summer by the Tennessee Crush men's minor league football team and will host a couple of high school football jamborees in August. Eckstein said he hopes to have the field smoothed and cleaned during the next seven weeks and then painted with UTC's emblems between Aug. 22 and the Mocs' Thursday night opener.

Before the Mocs' spring game, green paint was applied to both end zones in an attempt to cover the names. However, the paint wasn't the same color as the field and did little more than highlight what was underneath.

"I didn't really even notice what was in the end zones until Merrill showed me how they painted over it," said Mocs coach Russ Huesman, who was Richmond's defensive coordinator before being hired on Dec. 21. "I'm the coach here now, so we need to get that 'Spiders' off of there."