Within the confines of Brigham Young University lies an unheralded yet decorated dynasty.
It's not one of the school's successful sports teams or even the BYU Cougarettes, who have won 26 hip hop and jazz dance national championships.
That dynasty is BYU's landscaping team that in March won its 10th National Collegiate Landscape Competition championship, an event hosted annually by the National Association of Landscape Professionals.
This year's victory marks the university's sixth national title in just seven years.
For the competition itself, BYU brought a team of 60 students in the plant and landscape systems program to Colorado State University to compete across 30 different events like interior plant identification, landscape maintenance operations, and robotics and technology in landscape design and maintenance, just to name a few.
"It's kind of like a track meet in that everyone has their own event," said Tyler Stewart, a BYU student and one of two team leaders for the competition. "My event was hardscape installation, and for that event, we built a little patio with a fire pit in it."
Like track and field, teams that win their respective events earn points that go toward their overall team score.
When it was all said and done, BYU bested 57 other schools in the 49th rendition of the competition.
The structure of the landscaping team is unique from other teams in that most schools are primarily led by faculty members.
Nearly a decade ago, Greg Jolley, a professor in the plant and landscape systems program at BYU, realized that "students respond to students a little bit better, sometimes, than professors."
"These students are integral in making the team," Jolley said. "They create the synergy and team dynamic that makes them successful."
McKinsey Flores, a BYU student and other half of the landscaping team's competition leaders, said part of being a team leader entailed directing a class that students participated in during the winter semester, where they prepared for the conference.
"We talked a lot about networking and career opportunities that we would have at (National Collegiate Landscape Competition) and how best to utilize those as well as making sure that they were preparing in the best way possible for their event and keeping track of that," Flores said.
Jolley added that the program and the team benefits from a strong partnership with the BYU grounds and landscape management team — tasked with maintaining the campus' outdoor setting — which provides hands-on experience and additional mentorship.
