While his players are still in school, and the baseball field is deserted, Graham Baughn plugs in his earbuds, hops on a mini-mower under the beaming sun at Thomas Jefferson High School and spends the next three hours on cruise.

Another hour or two of prep work follows, as he waters the infield dirt, drags it, tamps the mound and batter’s box, chalks the baselines.

The to-do list is endless just to keep the diamond in shape.

Such is the life of a high school baseball coach, a title that almost always comes with a second job, and one that usually doesn’t pay: Head groundskeeper. Because if the varsity coach isn’t taking care of the field before games and on off-days, nobody is.

“We have a personal riding lawn mower that you would cut your house grass with, and it goes four miles per hour tops,” Baughn says. “To cut the entire field, it takes a while. It’s definitely a time commitment to put in the work that myself and other coaches do to make the fields playable, and not just playable but nice.

“The maintenance of the field is a safety thing, and a consistency thing, but it goes beyond that. I want to provide our guys a positive experience as well. And I get a lot of pride from seeing the end result.”

It’s a labor of love that is unique to the diamond. No other CHSAA sport besides baseball and softball requires its coaches to put in countless hours of extra time in order to make sure their teams’ surface is playable.

The Denver Post polled 10 varsity baseball coaches across Class 3A, 4A and 5A, and there was a consensus that groundskeeping is a critical and unheralded aspect of coaching at the prep level. During the season, those coaches spend anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week working on the field outside of practice/games.

That makes Baughn’s above-and-beyond effort with his field the norm. Mountain Vista coach Ron Quintana and an assistant spent most of a recent Sunday installing a turf halo around the Golden Eagles’ home plate. Over at Cherry Creek, 78-year-old Marc Johnson still does all the field prep and maintenance for the Bruins, minus fixing sprinkler heads. That includes cutting the grass, hours that he sees as “baseball I.Q. time and a great opportunity to develop how-to-win awareness.”

“I grew up in Nebraska so I feel like my field is like a ranch — there’s always something do,” Johnson said. “There’s always something that needs fixed.”

Private schools tend to have more help from their school’s grounds crew. At Regis Jesuit, coach Matt Darr feels fortunate to not have to do any of the mowing. But unless you’ve got the rarity of an all-turf field, like Valor Christian and Denver Christian, the commitment to upkeep a diamond is pretty much the same for coaches everywhere.

That’s especially true in public school districts where there are too many fields, and not enough help. Plus, those who aren’t directly connected to the team tend to approach mowing the field more like a park, and less like a piece of art.

“The grounds people in our district just don’t have enough help,” Rocky Mountain coach Scott Bullock said. “I would definitely say most coaches getting into this have no clue how much time it is to really have a facility that you’re proud of… and to get and to maintain a field that reflects what you’re trying to accomplish as a program.”

Under Johnson’s watch at Cherry Creek, as the Bruins have emerged as the most successful big-school program in state history, the field has undergone significant transformation. Almost all of those improvements have been pushed by Johnson, who made it a goal to upgrade or fix something at the field every season since his first in 1972.

Cherry Creek has done that, turning what was once a simple field in the middle of campus into one of the best “ballpark” experiences in Colorado prep baseball.

“We’ve got a big nice scoreboard, a press box, a concession stand, we’ve upgraded the hitting cages, the bullpens, the list goes on,” Johnson said. “This year we laser-leveled the infield. And we’ve got a lot of things in our planning, like we’re eventually hoping to put in a small clubhouse.”

As demonstrated by the maturation of Tom McCollum Field in Greenwood Village, coaches aren’t just the groundskeeper for their diamond. They’re the primary advocators for improvements, too.

Over at Thomas Jefferson, Baughn worked with administrators to secure funding for significant upgrades. During his seven-year tenure, the Spartans’ infield has been laser-leveled, plus they got a new mound, new backstop, new sod for the infield and foul territory, and new concrete paths around the field to make it ADA accessible.

Now with a big-league level infield, it’s up to Baughn to keep it maintained. He notes he’s thankful the district started paying him a stipend for the field work he does over the summer, when he still puts in about 10 hours a week groundskeeping.

“Before we had our infield redone, we had guys rolling ankles on our lips because they were so bad,” Baughn said. “And if our sprinklers ran, it flooded our infield, and we couldn’t practice that day… I finally took some pictures of the lips and sent them to the district to show how uneven they were, and later that fall, they actually marked our field unsafe to play. The next summer they replaced the infield.”

To add to the job of head groundskeeper and diamond advocator, coaches must have fundraising verticals built into their program.

Of the coaches from the six public school districts surveyed for this story, all of them receive an annual budget each spring from the district for their program. That budget is usually well under $10,000. But considering it costs anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 to run a spring program, with about $25,000 being the median for Class 5A schools, programs have to fundraise to make sure they have money to buy materials for their field.

One 5A coach estimated it takes anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 to maintain his field throughout the spring, depending on fixes that need to be made. Booster clubs, fueled by fundraisers and donations, foot the majority of that cost.

“We don’t get a field budget, so we have to fundraise to keep the field playable,” Mountain Vista coach Ron Quintana said. “We just turfed our infield grass, home plate, and the lines and mound are turfed, so that saves money and time. But it’s constant upkeep, it’s constant spending.”

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Mountain Vista, like other big programs, sells sponsorships for the outfield fence, plus other efforts like a casino night for parents and online fundraising.

Once the cash is raised, and the countless bags of Diamond Dry are bought and stacked in the equipment shed, the responsibility circles back to the head coach. Even though all programs assign players field chores after games and practices, and springtime snow removal is usually a program-wide effort, most of the heavy lifting and maintenance is done by the guys filling out the lineup cards.

“It’s kind of like if you were a really proper lady and people are coming to visit your house,” Johnson explained. “You don’t want to have stuff from the kids strewn all over the house. I feel the same way. I want the field to look good and I want players to want to come out and play here. I think most high school coaches feel the same way and know it’s up to them to get it done.”