Welcome to Harrogate Year!


Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff, Tony Murray, Kevin Whorley, Brian Llewellyn and Graham Oxley


The groundcare team with Freddie -ll-r r: Karl Spink ,


Kevin Whorley, Head Groundsman at Ashville College in Harrogate, talks about a year in the life of the groundcare team, ambulances, Freddie and more


A


shville College is an independent college based in Harrogate North Yorkshire. It was founded as a


Methodist boarding school for boys in 1877, and subsequently merged with Elmfield College and New College in the 1930s. It now thrives as the oldest private school in Harrogate, although it is classed as a Public School, being set up when most education was organised privately, in the home, rather than being available to anyone who could afford the fees. It is now open to non-Methodists and to those of non-Christian religions. A team of five groundsmen look after the whole campus and approximately fifty acres of sports pitches catering for most sports disciplines. These include three cricket squares (a 1st team, nine wicket square, a 2nd team, nine wicket square and a junior, seven wicket square), five senior and one junior rugby pitches, a senior football pitch and one five-a-side pitch, a 300 metre grass athletics track, a 200 metre hard surface track, five hard surface netball courts and six hard


80 surface tennis courts. At various times of the year the pitches


are also used for lacrosse, rounders and volleyball.


In addition to the outdoor facilities, the college has two sports centres and a swimming pool.


The team consists of myself, my


deputy, Graham Oxley, and three groundsmen, Karl Spink, Dave Allan and Brian Llewellyn We work to a tight schedule as we are continually preparing for sports fixtures, sports lettings and other bookings. Working around these events means that the basics, like fertiliser applications, overseeding, end of season cricket renovations and vertidraining, have to be carefully planned. The Harrogate soil is yellow clay, which is good for building on, but not much else! So, we have to have a very good vertidrain schedule in place. Basically, if the tractor can travel, its out ‘vertidraining’ with our new Wiedenmann Terra Spike.


At the time of writing (early November), we had carried out three passes across all the playing areas, starting at a depth of 6” with 5% heave. We do the first pass after a hectic spring and summer sports programme on all the fields, starting with the cricket outfields and then moving onto the rugby pitches. Then we change over to 10” solid tines and work at full depth with 15% heave. We continue this all the way into December. We usually start the cricket renovation work on the squares in the last week of August. We are very fortunate that the final college fixture is in the first week of July prior to the end of term. Then we just have evening league fixtures and any outside booking fixtures to oversee. This gives us a chance to get the wicket ends renovated, and gives us plenty of opportunity to get the squares watered using the newly installed irrigation system, which has certainly saved us time and money. During the season, the outfields are cut twice a week, and we let


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