Schools & Colleges
The American football pitch takes around three and a half hours to overmark
Rugby pitch No. 1
try his hand at sports turf management.” “When I came here I had very little to work with,” said Nigel. “No staff, no equipment, and playing surfaces that required significant improvement and investment. There was also the major project of building a stadium that met the Football Association’s requirements for the Women's Super League competition. Fortunately, I had the complete support of the Principal, Kevin Hamblin, whose goal is to have the best sports college in the country, and resources were readily provided, culminating in the superb facility we have here today.” “The stadium pitch is performing very well and has developed into what I believe to be one of the best playing surfaces in the Super League.”
Rob Lloyd divoting the academy pitch
performance in terms of drainage capacity, and sward quality”
been very interesting, with both pitches showing improved
“The results have
The pitch is managed like any other stadium pitch. Over fifty hours are spent preparing and repairing the pitch for matches. It is cut to a height of 30mm and mown on a daily basis throughout the growing season using a Dennis cassette cylinder mowers. The pitch is fed with a concoction of feeds, both granular and liquid formulations. They also use pedestrian rotary mowers to keep the surface clean and to stand the grass up after matches.
Having completed the first phase of the five year project (stadium pitch and track facilities), the second phase is to gradually improve the condition of the other pitches on site. Again, these were not in the best of health when Nigel took over, all being natural soil based with a primary drainage system at ten metre centres. “Not ideal,” stated Nigel. “As a result, surface levels and grass cover were poor.”
These pitches cater for rugby, football and
3g synthetic pitch 100 PC DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012
American football and Nigel is now addressing the problems on a pitch by pitch basis, starting with the number one
rugby pitch. Nigel was keen to try and incorporate rubber crumb into the surface to improve porosity, so it was koroed off, power harrowed and laser levelled, incorporating eighty tonnes of new rootzone and sixteen tonnes of rubber crumb. The pitch was then reseeded using Pro Select grass seed. “I’ve been very impressed with the way the pitch is now draining and performing in terms of grass coverage and growth. Root depth has been measured down to 200mm and the pitch is standing up well to a lot of fixtures. The cost of this operation was about £9,000, not much more than the basic cost of an end of season renovation,” he explained. Being somewhat ‘chuffed’ with the results of the rubber crumb material in the pitch, Nigel then turned his thoughts on trialing it in another way, His second team rugby pitch, again poorly drained, needed some work to improve the drainage capacity of the pitch. He then decided to try another method of utilising rubber crumb, this time using a Blec Sandmaster linear aerator to cut grooves 200mm deep at 200mm centres, but backfilling with rubber crumb material. “The results have been very interesting,” said Nigel, “with both pitches showing improved performance in terms of drainage capacity, and sward quality.” The rugby pitches are mown using
rotary mowers and kept at 100mm to cope with wear from so many games and training schedules. Renovations of the outer soil-based pitches is based on the following; scarifying to remove debris, vertidraining, topdressing with 50 tonnes of sand and 50 tonnes of compost and oversowing with a rye grass mixture. The current budgets only allow two pitches to be done each year.
The college also provides a pitch for American football, with their season running from April through to October. This pitch is kept at around 70mm. All pitches are marked using a laser spray jet marker, on a weekly or by fixture basis. It takes around three and a half hours to overmark the American football pitch using, on average, £140 worth of paint each time.
“I’m considering using some micro clover seed mixtures on some of the rugby
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