By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

Seekonk’s Kyle Carney took a circuitous route to the Feb. 1 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, where he will serve as a member of the grounds crew that will prepare the field at Raymond James Stadium for the NFL’s ultimate game.
Carney, a 2002 Bishop Feehan High School graduate, graduated from UMass-Dartmouth in 2006 with a degree in economics. Along the way, he began working with the Pawtucket Red Sox’ grounds crew at McCoy Stadium. Kyle’s love of the outdoors, coupled with his own interest in landscaping, fueled a change of careers.

“I started worked for the PawSox in January of my junior college (in college),” Carney recalled last week. “I had always enjoyed working outside. I took a lot of enjoyment in preparing a baseball field that would be seen by 700,000 baseball fans every year.”
With his parents’ approval, Kyle enrolled in the Turfgrass Science Program at the University of Connecticut in the fall of 2007, extending his college career for two more years in order to do something he loved.
“Last September, I received an email from my professor, Dr. Jason Henderson, talking about a contest run by The Toro Company,” Carney said. “The contest was open to turf management students from all over the country. The winner would get to work on the grounds crew for this year’s Super Bowl.”
Carney knew that with over 2,400 students sending in entries, he would have to come up with something unique.
“The only requirement in the contest was to submit a 500-word essay on where I wanted to be in five years,” Carney said. “The rest of it was up to the individual. I knew I had to do something different to make my entry stand out from the rest. I was driving home from school one day, thinking about different things to do, and I came up with the idea of turning our back yard into a small Super Bowl field.”
Carney went to work on the green grass of his parents’ yard, lining it with yard stripes and creating a football field approximately 30 yards long by 20 yards wide.
The key element is his entry would be a Super Bowl logo.
“I had already designed a PawSox logo in the back yard so I had an idea how to do this,” Carney admitted. “For the Super Bowl logo, I had to create a stencil that was about 20 feet by 8 feet. I cut some paper to those measurements, hung it on a wall in the house, then projected the Super Bowl XXLIII logo on to the wall. Then it was just a matter of tracing over the design and hand-painting the logo on to my football field.”
Once his mini-football field was completed, Carney took pictures from various angles and submitted them with his essay in a booklet form, detailing all the steps in his project.
“The whole thing took a good two weeks to complete,” Carney said. “I submitted my entry in the second week of October.”
Carney’s accompanying booklet and the attention to detail it illustrated might have been the item that made his entry stand out in the minds of judges. The contest committee selected Kyle’s entry as the best, beating out a nationwide field of fellow turf management students.
“Going to the Super Bowl and working with the best groundskeepers in the business is a tremendous honor and great learning opportunity,” Carney admitted. “We’ll be living in the NFL Village. I will fly down there on January 25. I think there are 25-30 people on the crew and they come from grounds crews all around the NFL.”
Carney will continue to work with the PawSox  under chief groundskeeper Matt McKinnon.
“I will graduate from college in May,” he said. “The PawSox are where my love for turf management really began. I ran my own landscaping business in high school, mostly cutting lawns. But when you get out on the field at McCoy, it’s just something I really enjoy doing.”
Kyle’s father, Jim, could attest to that.
“It was so obvious to me that he wanted to do this,” Jim Carney said. “My wife and I saw the passion Kyle had for turf management after he started working for the PawSox. He told us he was thinking about changing careers and we were all for it. It’s important to work at something you really love.”