The future of the industry showed off their hard work as more than 750 students competed in various events during the 50th National Collegiate Landscape Competition, presented by NALP and powered by STIHL, at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, on March 20.
While the individual competitive events may have only lasted minutes or hours for the students, this was the moment when months of preparation finally paid off.
Jim Funai, Ph.D., plant science and landscape technology professor at Cuyahoga Community College, says his team starts planning for NCLC informally in the fall, and then in December, they have their first full practice Saturday. After they come back from winter break, students meet every other Saturday, all day, to practice.
“This year, this group has put in extra days throughout the week,” Funai says. “We just had spring break, and we were practicing every single day of spring break.”
Hannah Reutter, a senior horticulture and crop and weed science double major at North Dakota State University, says the competition is her favorite aspect of NCLC.
“It’s super fun, especially the truck and trailer competition and turf and weed ID competitions,” Reutter says. “Those are my favorites that I’ve been doing for a few years now.”
Reutter notes that nowhere else can she get this level of hands-on experience, and the skills she hones at NCLC will make her more appealing to employers.
“This is really where an opportunity to see how the next generation thinks,” says Anterro Graham, general manager for Pro Cutters Lawnscapes, based in Conyers, Georgia. “As you look around at the different competitors, each of them has planned a different strategy to get this particular patio done. It’s an opportunity for them to look at their technique. The biggest thing is safety. Are they wearing safety gear? Are they working as a team? Those are things we within the industry would be looking for to see if they can be an asset to us.”
For many of the students, it is their first time attending and the competitive events provide an opportunity to explore a new skill.
“Sometimes they just want to try something completely new,” says Todd West, Ph.D., professor of horticulture at North Dakota State University. “In one case, we’ve got one of our students who’s done irrigation before, another one hasn’t, and so it’s kind of a mentor learning relationship.”
West says in the instance where students try something new, they often develop a passion for it.
This is what happened with Ian Holcomb, an ISA-certified arborist and crew leader for Davey Tree Expert Company, based in Kent, Ohio. A former Michigan State student, Holcomb says he wasn’t aware of arboriculture himself until competing in NCLC as a student.
“We had climbers come to one of our events, and I thought they looked super cool,” Holcomb says. “I did this event and was given the opportunity at NCLC for an internship, and I just fell in love with it, and I loved trees, but I didn’t realize that I could have a career.”
Now with Davey, Holcomb worked at the arboriculture event, assisting students who similarly chose to get out of their comfort zone.
Each of the NCLC events is designed to have a strong tie to real-world situations and operations. For instance, the robotics and technology in landscape design and maintenance event is structured to for students to show their understanding of how to implement robotics in a variety of different landscapes.
Kevin Caleca, North American product manager for robotics with Husqvarna, says this event is important because of where the industry is headed.
“From a company standpoint, it is getting the concept of robotic mowing out there,” Caleca says. “It’s getting in front of them, getting name recognition. So when they do go out into the field and go, ‘Oh, this is a perfect place to put a robot,’ the first thing they think is Husqvarna.”
Meanwhile, the construction cost estimating event tests students on their ability to look at a project and calculate the true cost to do the work.
Brandon Geppard, director of construction, sales and estimating for Environmental Management Inc., based in Plain City, Ohio, says that as processes move more to computer systems and AI, it is even more critical that students know what’s happening behind those systems and can make adjustments on the fly.
“Just because you put a quantity into an estimating system that gives you the finished price, if you don’t know what made that up or be able to adjust your production rates based on how difficult the job might be or how easy a job might be, it makes it a lot harder to be successful at estimating,” Geppard says.
Patrick Callahan, a first-year landscape and plant production technology major at Pennsylvania College of Technology, competed in the employee development event and says he appreciated playing out a scenario that could happen later down the road and knowing how to address it.
NCLC also introduced the new event, lawn care spreader sprayer operation, this year. Students were judged on their spray coverage and quantities, using Optix’s GPS heat map. Jenn Myers, senior director of workforce development for NALP, says this event helps expose students more to the lawn care realm and opens the door to welcome agronomy and turfgrass programs to NCLC.
“The heart of NCLC has always been the competitive events,” Myers says. “To have something for 50 years that has not lost its heart and soul, but is instead branched out to include other pieces and continually provide an even more well-rounded experience for the students, the faculty and the industry that come to the event is amazing.”
Another benefit of NCLC is the camaraderie, both among students and industry professionals.
Callahan says he’s grown closer to his program’s second-year students over the course of the event.
“This week, we’ve all gotten to know each other very well, and been having so much fun,” Callahan says. “It’s great going out to dinner all the time and even meeting the other teams. We got to meet a bunch of kids from North Dakota and Utah, so just people that I normally wouldn’t meet. It’s cool talking to different people, see where they’re from, and hear about how they came in the landscape industry.”
Myers says she’s heard from many students how they connect with others at NCLC and continue to stay in contact once they enter the industry because of their shared bond.
Dean DeSantis, owner of DeSantis Landscapes, based in Salem, Oregon, says he’s typically looking for students he connected with the day before at the career fair. He says he isn’t particularly concerned with how well they’re gluing irrigation pipe together or how level their pavers are. To him, it’s all about connecting more with that student and cheering them on.
“This is the fun, exciting part to actually see the students showing off their skills and maybe learning some skills,” DeSantis says. “A lot of the students may not have done a lot of this before, that’s fun to see the nerves and then the high fives of the students cheering each other on.”
Funai says the industry’s support of NCLC validates the students’ hard work.
“When you get an industry that’s excited to be part of it and encouraging them, they know they belong here,” Funai says. “They see themselves like, ‘That could be my future.’ Many of them are like, ‘I want to be that person one day, where I give back, and I’m the one encouraging new students.”
Thank you to our elite partners STIHL, Stanley Black & Decker, Caterpillar and Aspire for supporting this event. Additionally, thank you to our Gold Partners, John Deere and Mariani Premier Group, and all the other industry partners who help make NCLC possible.
