Majestic Maintaining
Football, Rugby Union, Academy matches, local cup finals, training nights, pop concerts .... Reading FC’s BRUCE ELLIOTT somehow finds time for pitch renovation!
AT READING Football Club we play host to 1st team, reserves and Premiership rugby union. In all we had 50 professional fixtures last season, including 6 “double headers” with football and rugby on the same weekend. We are fortunate enough to have a Desso system installed to cope with the rigours of dual-sports but, even with the Desso, the rugby does tend to cause a fair amount of damage through scrummaging, especially towards the end of the match when players become tired. The most damage tends to come from having both sports on the same weekend. Any damage caused by the football on the Saturday doesn’t get a chance to recover before the rugby on Sunday. In addition to the matches last season we also hosted two concerts - Elton John on 26th May and Summer XS on 5th June. Also, as the 1st team had just missed out on a play-off place, we turned the pitch over to our Academy and Marketing departments who arranged a number of local cup finals, training nights and a 6 a side tournament before the pitch was covered for our first concert. Four staff are based at the stadium, including myself and my assistant Greg Bolton. Our main task is to prepare and
maintain the stadium pitch for both sports. The other two members of staff, Gordon Neate and Melvyn Lovegrove, maintain our numerous grass and landscaped areas around the stadium. We also have 3 staff based at our new training ground, including Jem Fox who used to look after the stadium pitch until he took on the unenviable task of running the new facility. The training ground consists of a Fibre-sand pitch, 4 sand ameliorated pitches and 4 soil based Academy pitches. It was constructed last year by Kestrel Golf & Sports, who also recently installed sand bands across the ameliorated pitches. At the stadium, although we had a fairly successful season in maintaining a playable surface, we did suffer from poor surface drainage which led to a loss of grass coverage, especially through the centre of the pitch. This was partly due to a lack of a regular aeration programme. We don’t have our own aeration equipment, so have to rely on contractors - something I am resolving by purchasing a Toro 648 Procore pedestrian aeration unit in the coming weeks. This led to a build up of organic
FOOTBALL
MADEJSKI
matter at the surface which would not allow moisture through to the root-zone. We also had a fairly high percentage of Poa, which had established itself in the sward. I made the decision, along with our consultant John Hacker from PSD, that the existing sward and organic layer had to be removed for the forthcoming season. We chose Kestrel to carry out our renovations as they are a local
company and had constructed our
training
ground to a high standard.
Bruce Elliott
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