Tra DuBois was a pretty good tennis player at Belhaven back in the early 1970s. Today, his “strokes” are paint filled and yes, pretty good as well. The Yazoo City native and Leland businessman owns and runs World Class Athletic Surfaces. A business name many have never heard of yet hundreds of millions have seen their work.
From Mississippi State University Davis Wade Stadiums Scott Field to every Major League Baseball and National Football League field across the United States, their paint adorns and dresses up the grass and field turf for game day. And yes, their paint will be front and center on Super Bowl Sunday and has been for the past three decades.
Pat Dickens is the Office Manager for World Class Athletic Surfaces and he along with Tra’s younger brother Andre and Mississippi State’s own Sports Turf Superintendent and College Football’s resident Turf King explain the company’s mission and story.
“We grew up building tennis courts and we were out in Texas working for the largest tennis court building company in the United States. After 15 years out there, Tra decided it was time to come home,” Andre DuBois said. “The guys that owned that company treated Tra and I like sons. They were great guys and great gentlemen and Tra had made them a lot of money. They gave Tra a tennis court paint formulation when he left.”
The elder brother had a friend with a trucking company in Greenville who offered him some space to create his paint and work his tennis court paint business. Then one day, Tra got a call from Mississippi State 35 years. It seems their game day field paint was being held up by a truckers’ strike and they needed a miracle. Tra had just finished making paint for the State tennis teams’ courts and State was hosting Alabama and had no paint for their field. Only producing white paint at the time, Tra got the State folks to send him jerseys, helmets, stickers and anything with maroon and white so he could create and try to match the colors. The call came Monday, he had the materials in hand Monday night and by Wednesday had perfected the colors that the late Jack Cristil so loved to wrap games up with.
“The guy went back to Mississippi State and painted the field on Thursday morning, played Alabama on Saturday and that Saturday night the athletic director called the grounds turf guy and said, ‘I don’t know what you did different to the field this week but whatever you did, don’t ever change,’” Andre said. “That was all it took because his best friend was at Alabama and that guy at Alabama’s best friend was at South Carolina and the guy at Ole Miss wanted to follow suit and the guy at Oklahoma wanted to follow suit. Then Arkansas fell right in line and Tennessee and everybody else just fell right in line. It’s probably one of those really great rags to riches stories. He went from begging folks and giving away his paint for folks to try and get it somewhere because he was not in the industry.
He also noted that his brother was eco-aware in a time when the world wasn’t.
“Tra always went over the top extremes to make it the best product he could possibly make – and it was eco-friendly. Back then, nobody cared what it did to the grass or to the air or anything but Tra did. It was so good for the grass and the root system that it spread like wildfire,” Andre said.
Stenciling was a big thing as each field needed to be painted with school and team names and other special items. Tra painfully created the stencils using a huge wall with plywood and a projector screen until a chance meeting on a flight to a trade show made his life easier. His seatmate was in the fabric industry and they naturally explained their businesses to each other.
“He told Tra he needed to look at cutting machines. ‘It would probably make your life a lot simpler,’” Andre said. “He got to looking at that and the next thing you know we have the largest cutting machine in the country. It’s 17-foot wide and 74-foot long. That thing can draw and cut faster than you can talk. He can do an endzone in a couple of hours. It used to take two to three days.”
Andre has become a “white paint expert” for the company. A job he takes to heart and performs to the best of his ability.
“People have been painting football fields forever and once they are hung on a color, they don’t care what PMS number it is. Making colors is a really big issue and you have to make sure every color is right when it walks out that door no matter if its Tennessee or Southfield High School,” he said. “Tra believes in guaranteeing customer service and do whatever it takes to make the groundskeeper’s life easier. That is our job.”
Brandon Hardin is one of those groundskeepers and is the Turf King of the collegiate world. The Belzoni native spends plenty of time at World Class and always has 100s of gallons of their product on hand.
“Depending on our paint scheme for the week, we paint 300-350 gallons. The first game of the 2022 season was my career record of 410 gallons,” Hardin said. “We order 2,200 gallons of paint to start with because we don’t have any more room to store it. That will take us to the halfway point. This year we had to order an additional 825 gallons for the year – just on football. That doesn’t count practice fields.”
With more suppliers in the industry, Hardin has tried other products but no one beats World Class.
“I’ve known those guys for the majority of my life. That whole group is great people supplying a great product,” he said. “There are other companies but I would never get the customer service nor the quality of the product from other companies. I’ve tried other products to do my due diligence but I always come back to World Class.”
When World Class officials were asked if they sell more Ole Miss red and blue or State maroon, Dickens gave the classic politically correct answer – “I refuse to answer that question (laughing). We love both universities. We sell Jackson State blue and Millsaps purple.”
But Hardin knows the true answer to that question.
“That’s a big hard ‘no.’ We have 32 letters in the endzones. That right there is more Ole Miss has combined. We could show up to Ole Miss and paint everything they have start to finish in one day. They couldn’t paint our field in four days and we do it in two. My crew is the best in the business because we have to paint so much. We have 32 letters in the endzone, a 40-foot by 60-foot logo at midfield that I love. That’s 2,400 square feet of paint we have to paint two square inches at a time.”
The field gets two coats of paint each and every home game. Maroon and white.
“The one thing World Class has over everybody in the industry is nobody makes that white paint as bright as Andre,” he said. “I can’t harp on it enough of what great people they are and what a great product they have. The biggest selling point for me is they push me to the front of the line. If I get in an emergency situation, they bump me to the front of the line because I can be there in a couple of hours to pick it up.”
The company even has an aerosol paint and paint machines.
“They have robots. We use the turf tank – a GPS guided robot – on some of our fields because of the accuracy. We don’t use them at the stadium because the high sides mess with the signal. They have tailored a world class ready to use turf paint for the robots. Our thick turf paint won’t work with that machine. They have saved us from a lot of issues with that technology.”
Dickens helps manage the on-site staff of nearly 20 employees at the Leland “world headquarters.” He was working on a last minute order to get to the Super Bowl when interrupted for the story.
“I’m kind of the new kid (worked there for the past seven years),” Dickens said. “We’re very blessed. It just doesn’t stop. More and more high schools are ordering from us. More park and recreation, large municipalities. This used to be a quiet time after the first of the year but we’ve been really blessed and we keep on going.”
Sporting events continued during COVID – even without fans and World Class kept making paint.
“We were very intentional and strategic in making sure we ordered everything in a timely fashion and we didn’t anticipate any shutdown. That was a bold strategy and it paid off. They were still playing on these fields that needed to be marked.”
World Class uses their own shipping suppliers to ensure the product gets where it’s going on time and intact. Dickens could only remember one instance of that not happening. From begging folks to take his paint for their tennis courts to painting worldwide sporting stages, Tra Dubois, his brother Andre and the rest of World Class Athletic Surfaces continue to strive to be the best and to quite frankly, stay the best.
