Major League Baseball players have more than a month to get ready for the season and shake off their winter rust, there’s no spring training for the grounds crew.

There isn’t much prep time before the MLB’s nationwide opening day, when the field has to be perfect: Not too wet, not too dry, and the grass just the right length so that ground balls don’t slow down too much or skip too quickly.

So, about 24 hours before the first pitch of the season at Nationals Park, home of the Washington Nationals, the team’s director of field operations, John Turnour has a lot on his mind.

Turnour studied turf management at North Carolina State University, then worked in the minor leagues before getting an assistant job with the Baltimore Orioles, then the San Diego Padres. This will be Turnour’s 16th MLB season total, and his ninth season as the Nationals’ head groundskeeper. His length of tenure is evident: Nothing escapes his attention, not even single blades of grass.

“We can also pull out a leaf blade and just kind of inspect it to see where that cutting point is from the mower,” he said. “And if it’s a nice clean cut like we have right there, we know that we’ve got a good cut from our mower. If we’ve got a bad cut, that will become very jagged.”

On game days, the Nationals Park field can be mowed anywhere from one to three times a day. Turnour and his team of 42 people mow, water, edge and rake with painstaking detail to give the field the gleaming quality that professional ones are renowned for.

Turnour spent decades learning how to maintain a pristine baseball field. He decided early on he wanted to be a groundskeeper, but that wasn’t his initial plan.

“I think every kid growing up they always think they’re going to be the next baseball player out there,” he said. “I think that quickly comes into realization as you go through high school that’s probably not going to happen. At least I figured that out pretty quick.”

But unlike most aspiring major leaguers who reach that reality check, he figured out a way to work in the majors. “My brother and I, we had a baseball field in our back yard,” he recalled. “We had a pitching mound. We had bases. We tried to mow mowing patterns.”

But those mowing patterns never quite worked for Turnour and his brother: The mowers that even the most dedicated lawn aficionado tend to use aren’t built to create the sleek cuts of professional baseball.

Turnour says he’s often asked how to recreate the look of his field, but in order to do so, you’d need the special mowers his team uses.

He explained it’s not the blades of his mowers that create the famous checkerboard patter, but the rollers. “There’s a roller on the back [of the mower]. … So when [a mower] is going away from you, that roller’s pushing all that grass away from you,” Turnour said. “All that grass is generally bent over this way, giving it that light effect.”

Some teams go all out with their grass patterns — the St. Louis Cardinals regularly sculpt their city’s famous arch into the outfield. Turnour and the Nationals keep it much more straightforward. From an aerial view, their field resembles a checkerboard.

The day after Turnour spoke with NPR, the Nationals lost to the New York Mets, 8 – 2. But the outfield patterns looked beautiful — dark green and light green in three distinct shades, immaculately checkerboarded across the infield and outfield grass, thanks to Turnour and his team.

NPR’s Emily Sullivan produced this story for digital.

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Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic description of sexual behavior.

Jean Lopez, who coached the U.S. Olympic taekwondo team from 2004-2016, has been banned from USA Taekwondo. NPR obtained a copy of a report, issued by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, which has not been made public. According to the report, Lopez had “a decades long pattern of sexual misconduct” and used his status as a respected athlete and coach to “groom, manipulate, and, ultimately, sexually abuse younger female athletes” — including minors.

The Lopez case was one of the first big tests for SafeSport, an entity created in March 2017 to investigate sexual abuse allegations in the 48 athletic governing bodies that operate under the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Lopez and his family have been hugely influential in taekwondo over the past two decades; the Los Angeles Times even dubbed them the sport’s “first family.” Lopez’sbrother Steven is the most decorated athlete in the sport, with two Olympic gold medals, a bronze medal and five world championships. Their other siblings, Diana and Mark, were also Olympians in taekwondo.

That success has come even as multiple athletes have accused both Jean and Steven of assault over the past dozen years, with little response from the sport’s governing body, USA Taekwondo.

The family’s competitive reputation attracted top athletes to the training center Jean Lopez operated in Houston. One of them was Heidi Gilbert. Under Lopez’s tutelage, Gilbert, then 19, won a gold medal in her weight class in the Pan American Games in Quito, Ecuador, in 2002.

But, Gilbert says, that win was overshadowed by what happened immediately afterward. She says she and Diana Lopez, who had also competed in the event, went back to Jean Lopez’s hotel room to celebrate. Gilbert remembers that the two women flexed their muscles in a full-length mirror.

“We were like, ‘Look at my traps; look at my six-pack,’ ” she says. “Jean is like, ‘You girls are so awesome. You guys are going to go to the Olympics.’ “

After Diana left the room, Gilbert says, Jean’s tone quickly changed. She recalls that he threw her onto the bed. At first, she thought they were wrestling. But then, she says, he put her in a fetal position, rubbed his groin against her, and ejaculated into his pants.

Gilbert was shocked. Her first instinct was to blame herself for drawing attention to her body.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I was flexing in front of his mirror. I’m an idiot,’ ” she says.

Gilbert says she didn’t speak to Jean Lopez for the remainder of the trip. But she decided to go back to Texas and continue training with him, in part because he had seemed to promise it would not happen again.

“He reassured me,” she says. “He said, ‘Once you move out here, everything is business, and you’re my athlete and I’m going to take care of you.’ “

Gilbert’s own ambition also guided her decision. She had dreamed of being in the Olympics since she was a little girl, and a spot on the the 2004 U.S. Olympic team seemed within her reach.

“You don’t want to believe you’re in a bad situation,” she says. “Because the training is so good, your Olympic dreams are so high, you are honestly willing to sacrifice everything to achieve that.”

She says nothing untoward happened during the following year in Texas. But in 2003, she traveled with Jean Lopez to compete in the World Championships in Germany. At an after-party, he offered her a drink that she believes was drugged. Gilbert says she felt “completely out of it.” Her body went limp, but she was still able to perceive what was happening to her. She remembers Jean Lopez sexually assaulting her in the hotel where they were staying.

After Gilbert returned to the United States, she left the Lopez training facility. Shortly after that, she stopped competing in taekwondo altogether. Today, she runs a taekwondo school with her husband in Southern California.

Jean Lopez did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment. In the past, he has denied any inappropriate behavior.

Gilbert considered going to the police after the second incident, but she assumed they wouldn’t be able to do much since the alleged assaults had happened abroad. She also decided against filing a report with USA Taekwondo, the sport’s national governing body.

In 2006, another athlete, Mandy Meloon, did make public allegations against both Jean and Steven Lopez. Meloon had been a top taekwondo fighter since the mid-1990s, winning bronze medals at two world championships. In her complaint, she alleged that Jean Lopez had inappropriately touched her when she was a minor during an overseas competition in 1997 and had resorted to abusive practices in his coaching.

Meloon had also been in a long-term relationship with Steven Lopezfrom 1999-2006, and she alleged that on several occasions he sexually and physically assaulted her.

Steven Lopez did not return emails and calls seeking comment. Neither Jean nor Steven Lopez has been charged with a crime.

USA Taekwondo dropped Meloon from the national team in April 2007, citing failure to attend practices. Meloon says she had been diligent about training but had suffered a broken cheekbone that forced her to forgo some sessions. She tried to be reinstated through arbitration, but lost her bid.

Neither Jean nor Steven Lopez was publicly reprimanded by USA Taekwondo after the investigation into Meloon’s 2006 allegations.

The entire experience, Meloon says, was deeply demoralizing.

“[The Lopezes] were rewarded and promoted [despite the assault allegations] because Steven won Olympic medals,” she says.

Meloon had a difficult adjustment after she was dropped from the team. She was homeless for a period and spent two years in prison for assaulting a police officer.

Jon Little, an attorney who has specialized in suing Olympic sports’ governing bodies on behalf of people who have suffered sexual assault, says USA Taekwondo has beeneven less proactive about protecting athlete safety than other governing bodies that have come under recent scrutiny for mishandling assault accusations.

“Gymnastics and swimming, when confronted with criminal indictments, generally would take action,” Little says. “Taekwondo did nothing, until very recently.”

In 2015, USA Taekwondo hired an outside attorney, Donald Alperstein, to look intoallegations that surfaced on the Internet against the Lopez brothers and other male athletes in the sport. Alperstein alerted local law enforcement and the FBI to his findings and, in early 2017, turned the case over to the newly created SafeSport organization.

In total, four women have made public allegations against Jean Lopez to SafeSport or the U.S. Congress, which launched its own inquiry into sexual assault in sports earlier this year. At least two former athletes have told SafeSport they were raped by Steven Lopez.

Steve McNally, who has run USA Taekwondo since October of last year, says he wants to restore athletes’ faith in the governing body, and he thinks SafeSport will help. McNally believes USA Taekwondo was inherently ill-suited to conduct criminal investigations against its own members. “I think the SafeSport Center is going to be a great step forward in this area for everybody,” McNally says.

Gilbert spoke with SafeSport last May as part of the investigation. Her allegations, and those of two other athletes, are cited in the organization’s findings against Jean Lopez.

While Gilbert is gratified by SafeSport’s conclusions, she also feels the group could have acted more expeditiously. SafeSport issued the Jean Lopez ban after NPR and other news outlets asked about the status of the investigation last week. The organization has declined to comment on the Steven Lopez case, per its policy on all active investigations.

Meloon agrees that the decision was “a long time coming.” But she hopes it will mark a change in how these cases are handled. “I feel like we made it to the other side,” she says. “It’s like now the system is working.”

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Through the first seven minutes of Monday night’s men’s college basketball championship in San Antonio, the Michigan Wolverines were feeling good. They’d held Villanova’s vaunted, best-in-the-nation offense to eight points, running their shooters off the three-point line while pounding the ball inside to German giant Moe Wagner.

Then the Wildcats’ Donte DiVincenzo got up off the bench.

The sophomore guard dropped in 18 points on 8-10 shooting before halftime, providing nearly half of Villanova’s scoring as they went into the locker room up 37-28. Michigan never got close again and Villanova won its second title in three years, 79-62.

DiVincenzo finished with 31 points — a title game record — plus 5 rebounds and two emphatic blocked shots. Junior guard Mikal Bridges added another 19 points.

Wagner finished with 16 points and 7 rebounds for the Wolverines, struggling to find his rhythm again after Villanova switched defensive tactics against him in the first half, focusing on keeping the ball out of the junior forward’s hands. Senior guard Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman had 23 points.

The win marks the second athletic title in three months for the Philadelphia area, following the Eagles win over the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. Just as the city did ahead of that game, the suburban school had light poles on campus greased to keep celebrating fans from doing anything too dangerous.

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