Over 150,000 homes and businesses lost power, around 30,000 trees were damaged and over two feet of snow accumulated during Manitoba’s record-breaking snowstorm on Friday, Oct. 11, 2019. The storm caused damage so severe that highways were closed, and the province called a state of emergency.
Over at IG Field, piles and piles of snow covered the field and stands, but against all odds, Lynda McCausland and her stadium operations team had the surface ready for a Saturday afternoon kickoff against the Montreal Allouettes.
“We were removing snow throughout the night and it kept falling,” McCausland recalled. “Then, once we were able to, we started painting logos, all the football markings. It seemed to have been an impossible deadline, but we met it. We painted into the evening and then first thing early morning is when we started painting football lines and the rest of the logos. We basically stopped painting shortly before teams came out, but surprisingly when I checked, everything was dry.
“Some of the comments that we heard coming in from the spectators was that they walked in from outside in a snowstorm into seeing a green field and a clean seat to sit on and it was great.”
McCausland is the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ Stadium Operations Supervisor and is the third subject in our Unsung Heroes series where we profile some of the staff who work behind the scenes with the football club.
“We have a great operations team, we work very well together, we help each other out wherever needed,” she said. “If I’m needing assistance on the field, I can certainly rely on the rest of my team.
“My motto is ‘we’re one team, one dream’. We all strive to put on a great game day for the fans, and for myself on the field it’s about providing a safe environment for our players — that’s number one for me.”
Born and raised in Saskatchewan, she graduated from the University of Regina in 1995 with a Bachelor of Physical Activity Studies. Shortly after, McCausland made the move from Rider Nation to the city of blue and gold.
She started work in event management with the Manitoba Summer and Winter Games, the Pan-American Games, and then onto working with two Olympic Committees before maintaining and preparing fields and stadiums became her job in 2017. McCausland worked for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup and 2017 Canada Summer Games before landing her gig with the Bombers in November 2017.
When McCausland left Saskatchewan and moved to Winnipeg for work, it didn’t take long for her Canadian Football League allegiances to shift.
“I’m now a Bombers fan, 100 percent,” McCausland said with a laugh. “My brother, Tom, is a huge Roughriders fan and same with my mom, so I tend to rub the Grey Cup in to them as much as I can… I buy my brother a Bombers t-shirt just in case he needs to wear one on game day, or on Banjo Bowl. He refuses every time.”
McCausland and some members of her stadium operations team made the long drive out to Calgary for the 2019 Grey Cup. The game is something she will always remember, but a memory was made in the endzone at McMahon Stadium 24 hours earlier.
“We had the opportunity to see the venue the day prior,” said McCausland. “I also had the opportunity to come down to the field and Bruce Simpson who paints for the CFL was painting the ‘W’, and he actually let me paint part of the ‘W’ which was a huge highlight of mine… it was nice to paint a few strokes of that logo.”
McCausland considers Simpson one of the best field painters and said it was an honour that he let her paint those few strokes.
Lisa Kingham-Mork, Director of Stadium Operations; Laurel Gray, Stadium Operations Manager; Lynda McCausland, Stadium Operations Supervisor
In 2019, McCausland didn’t know what to expect when the Canadian Premier League and Valour FC came to Winnipeg. The CFL and CPL seasons overlap, which means McCausland and her team have to clean and paint the field whenever transitioning from football to soccer, or vice versa. This process takes the stadium operations team well over a few days to complete.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is there’s a larger conversion process removing the entirety of the football markings which includes the logos,” she said. “The man hours that are involved in that is quite large with the machinery on the field as well, and then painting soccer. You need a little bit of time in between there for the field to dry and then paint soccer and then reverse that where we remove soccer and we paint football. And this is usually done fairly quickly after one sport has finished.”
Not only does the field need to be adjusted for the games, but the teams need the correct painting on the field for their practices, too.
During this global pandemic, IG Field doesn’t need to be switched from one sport to another, so McCausland is taking advantage of the time she has at home. During the season, she averages a step count between 35,000 and 40,000 steps on game day and without that running around, she’s staying active and working out from home. She’s also getting creative in the kitchen with new recipes and working on making personal greeting cards and some home renovations.
McCausland also FaceTimes her mom and brother in Regina more often now, and you can bet she is wearing her Bombers gear when she’s on a call with them to rub in that Grey Cup championship just a little bit more.
