you need drive and, above all, you need a competitive edge,” he says. “To be successful and enjoy sport to the maximum, you need to pit yourself against top opposition on the best conditions possible. Surface preparation is a huge part of the whole sporting excellence thing, and where better than at school to be put to the test.” In his ‘kit bag’ John can call
on three tractors, a triple mower, two 36-inch outfield mowers, a Dennis FT510 pedestrian mower with cassette attachments for cricket square work and the like, a set of gang mowers, tractor-mounted slitter with spiker, and a tractor- mounted Graden scarifier he describes as awesome. He will hire in limited period specialist equipment, like the heavy roller in action on this particular day, whenever necessary. Being in a valley, the main pitch area is prone to flooding from the surrounding Downs, so heavy-duty water pumps are sometimes called into play. There’s only a maximum of four inches of topsoil on the main pitch area. It’s very alkaline – somewhere around 7.8-8.0 pH - and it gets very compacted. The school also has what is known as ‘Hill Fields’, 120 feet higher up, but here there is a foot and a half of topsoil and it is more clay- based. In all, the school ‘footprint’ is seventy-six acres, though this does include surrounding woodland. Top of his wish list is a most laudable aim driven, not surprisingly, by his own sporting passion. He’d love to see support from the government - or any funding source for that matter - given to private sector schools to help them make it possible to share their sporting facilities with schools in the state sector. “We have a senior state school and three primary
schools within easy reach of our grounds, each of them in need of extra outdoor sports space,” says John. “We couldn’t afford to let them use our grounds for nothing: they couldn’t afford to pay us the going rate, but there has to be a way of sharing these facilities at cost.”
“Up and down the country,
there must be countless state schools within a stone’s throw of better facilitated private schools. The Sport for All slogan banded about by politicians is a joke, as school playing fields continue to shrink and pass into the hands of developers. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if funding could be found to see that school pitch sharing was a viable proposition. I’m sure there must be a way of setting this in motion.”
He genuinely believes that, if
there is a will, this would really work. It’s a bold idea, one of a competitive sporting mind. He who dares wins. He’s still enthusing about it as we walk across the perfectly marked athletics track on to the cricket outfield.
This year, for the first time, over the Easter holidays, John overseeded the school’s pitches with a 50% rhizomatous tall fescue and 50% ryegrass mix. It is somewhat experimental, but John reckons it should thrive on the thin topsoil and reduce irrigation needs in time. Last summer, he conducted another experiment on the main pitch area, currently in cricket and athletics mode, but home to the rugby first XV over the previous two terms. A just visible slight washboard effect was the legacy, but he hopes for a positive long-term effect. He explains: “We can’t afford to plane the surface off, put new topsoil down and re-seed. It would cost too much and take too long. I’d seen a Blec Sandmaster in operation, and I
“What we do is micro-manage. It isn’t ideal, but it gets us through the mess. By about three o’clock on day one, I work out what I think we need to do on days two, three, four and five based on what the PE department tell me”
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