ROTC cleans up OSU’s Horseshoe

By AMY SAUNDERS

COLUMBUS — At 5:45 a.m. Sunday, just a few hours after their friends had gone to bed, the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps prepared for a daunting mission.

The objective: picking up after the 105,301 Buckeyes fans who attended the football game Saturday against Wisconsin.

The volume of the remnants in Ohio Stadium seemed to suggest that only one in three people ever makes a trip to the garbage can: nacho cheese oozing into bleachers, piles of miniature Southern Comfort bottles littering the student section and drinks and full boxes of popcorn reaching into the field.

“It’s a mess. It’s always a mess,” said fifth-year student John Schaeffer, the task-group commander who oversees the unit. “You look up into C Deck and just see trash.”

For 45 years, the Athletics Department has paid the Navy ROTC to tidy the Horseshoe after home games (and the spring game).

The 146 members, plus eight ROTC staff members, each contribute two to four hours of trash pickup, while Ohio State University facility-operations employees handle the stadium bathrooms and concourses.

For the Navy ROTC, the payoff is sizable: an annual sum of $49,000, the main source of funding for its training trips, competitions and social activities.

The hours, though, aren’t favorable: Even when the Buckeyes play a night game, the midshipmen must report for duty under the stadium lights by 6 a.m. — when the B Deck televisions still show late-night infomercials.

Sunday, the cleaners tied skirts of trash bags around their waists, donned gloves and iPods, and descended the ramp where the Buckeyes had taken the field 14 hours earlier.

After straightforward orders from 1st Lt. Jeffrey Payne (“Hey, let’s just try to get this done as soon as possible”), the unit was divided into trash pickers and trash blowers — who began tackling the south stands.

The senior leaders, who have memorized the stadium layout, then assigned each person to one row around the stadium.

For the second consecutive game, unlucky freshman Miles Stebbins scored the highest row of B Deck — which, with its deeper floors, required him to lie on his stomach and slide across the bleachers while reaching his arm down for garbage.

The garbage belies the high cost of concessions, with the workers retrieving untouched pretzels off seats and pouring out drinks to form puddles of Coke on the concrete.

Other leftovers they’ve encountered were clearly purchased outside the ’Shoe: a fifth of liquor, a case of beer.

“I don’t know how they do it,” senior Dan Gallante said, “because I can’t even bring in a bottle of water.”

The cleanup also has yielded personal belongings, including cameras, wads of cash and clothing still in gift-shop bags.

“I like cleaning up the stadium,” junior Lydia Thomas said. “I’m a pack-rat kind of person, so it’s like an adventure. You never know what you’re going to find.”

Inevitably, the treasure hunt reveals unpleasant twists: a dirty diaper, for example, or a pigeon with a fatal attraction to the scoreboard.

“The worst is dip spit. Everywhere you go, there’s dip spit,” sophomore Danny Koch said. “You’re like ’I can’t believe I have to touch that.”’