Penn State University master's degree student and GCSAA member Zineb Alouani has a knack for carving out a victory.

Currently a turfgrass science graduate student in the esteemed Penn State University turfgrass program, she previously served as Morocco’s first female superintendent.

She’ll say, “first superintendent in general.” That she was the first person, and first woman, makes it a little extra special. Golf courses in Morocco, although few, have historically been operated by greenkeepers from Spain and other nearby countries where golf is more widely played. Locals, Alouani says, aren’t very familiar with golf courses, let alone grass lawns.

After falling in love with a golf course during a chance undergraduate visit to a Moroccan course, she spearheaded her own internship and customized her degree in engineering as an agronomic engineer in landscape architecture, which later led to the opportunity to work her way up to the superintendent role at a Moroccan course.

After a few years serving as a superintendent, Alouani felt she needed to grow her expertise in places with established turf programs and from professionals with a breadth of knowledge on golf course maintenance. Cue Ohio State University’s International Turfgrass Intern Program, which pairs international interns with courses, often courses with upcoming high-profile tournaments. To give her ambitions abroad a chance at success, she taught herself English. The polyglot is now fluent in four languages.

Over the next few years, she racked up internships and experiences of which some might consider a single one their career highlight. Even more rare, even unheard of, for a woman from Morocco. She served as an intern at the renowned Bel Air Country Club, which offered her the opportunity to meet a former President Barack Obama) She had an internship at Augusta National during the overseeding season. And, as a Penn State undergraduate student, she was on the team that won the GCSAA Turf Bowl in 2025.

So, anyone who knows Alouani knows that it comes as no surprise that she was part of yet another “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” this time, volunteering with the FIFA Pitch Management Team during the FIFA Club World Cup in Miami.

For Alouani, it was an almost tailor-made opportunity: soccer has been a lifelong passion, and turfgrass has become her profession. Growing up in Morocco, she remembers soccer as more than a sport — it was something that brought family and friends together. Years later, she was helping prepare the playing surfaces behind one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

Her assignment took her to FIFA’s Referee Camp in Miami, where more than 170 referees trained for approximately a month on four dedicated pitches. (That’s “fields” for Americans.) The work took place over several weeks in May and June and required the team to keep all four surfaces performing to FIFA standards while working around a tightly controlled training schedule.

If that sounds familiar to a golf course superintendent, it should. The scale and setting were different, but much of Alouani’s daily work came straight out of the turf manager’s playbook: mowing, irrigation and moisture management, divot repair, line marking, general turf maintenance and performance testing. And, just as a superintendent manages greens, tees and fairways not simply for appearance but for how they play, FIFA’s pitch managers were constantly evaluating how their surfaces would perform for athletes.

Every detail mattered. Mowing patterns had to be precise and uniform. Irrigation timing and moisture levels affected performance. Surface firmness was monitored. Even the iconic light-and-dark stripes seen on television required perfectly straight mowing passes and consistent overlap. Line marking was another exercise in precision, with measurements and markings required to conform to FIFA specifications. The goal wasn’t simply a field that looked beautiful on television; the surface had to be safe, consistent and predictable for the people using it. That performance component especially appealed to Alouani the graduate student and researcher.

The team collected objective measurements including soil moisture and surface hardness using equipment such as the Clegg Impact Soil Tester and other ProPitch technology. Alouani also met Simon Grumbrill and Dr. Kyley Dickson of SGL and learned about the fLEX system, technology that can collect standardized measurements across a larger area of the playing surface and help managers visualize variability across a field.

There was a Penn State connection, too. The university recently received a fLEX machine that Alouani expects will be incorporated into research projects and field trials. Seeing the technology operating in a FIFA environment — and then returning to Penn State with the possibility of using that same equipment in research — connected two sides of her education: the hands-on agronomy of managing turf and the increasingly data-driven science of understanding how that turf actually performs.

That may be one of the strongest parallels between elite sports turf and modern golf course management. Healthy, attractive turf is only part of the equation. Managers increasingly pair their observations and experience with objective measurements to decide what a playing surface needs, when it needs it and how a management practice affects performance.

Still, perhaps the coolest lesson came when Alouani wasn’t standing on a pitch at all.

With FIFA’s tournament operations headquartered in Miami, Alouani had several opportunities to visit headquarters. For the tournament’s opening match in Mexico, a senior FIFA pitch manager invited her to watch from the Pitch Management office.

She assumed they would watch the game. Instead, she walked into something resembling the control center for a massive global sporting event. Large screens filled operations rooms, with different departments monitoring their respective pieces of the tournament. Inside the Senior Pitch Managers’ office, notebooks came out as soon as the match began.

They weren’t watching like soccer fans. Every player slide was scrutinized. Every divot, ball bounce, shift in turf color, seam in the sod and movement of the playing surface became information. The pitch managers discussed what they were seeing from an agronomic perspective, effectively conducting a live performance evaluation while the match unfolded.

Then came halftime. While television viewers watched commercials, the screens in FIFA headquarters switched to live operational feeds from the stadium. Alouani watched the grounds crew repair divots, inspect the surface and prepare it for the second half while the senior pitch managers evaluated the work in real time. They discussed what had gone well, what could be improved and what should be documented for future matches.

For anyone in golf course management, there’s another familiar lesson there. The work doesn’t end when the first ball is struck, or, in this case, when the referee blows the whistle. Playing conditions become feedback. Observation becomes data. And preparation for the next round, match or maintenance window begins almost immediately.

Alouani came away from FIFA with an even greater appreciation for what golf and soccer turf managers share. A golf course requires management of an entire property and many distinct playing surfaces, while a FIFA tournament concentrates tremendous scrutiny on a single surface with short maintenance windows and little margin for error. Yet both depend on the same fundamentals: careful planning, communication, adaptability, attention to detail and an insistence on getting hundreds of small things right.

The experience also had special significance for Alouani as a Moroccan. Morocco will co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup, and she hopes what she learned in Miami might someday allow her to contribute to that event in her home country.

From Morocco’s first superintendent to Augusta National, Penn State and now FIFA, Alouani has made something of a career out of finding doors that weren’t necessarily open to her and walking through them anyway.

Or, sometimes, creating the door herself.