Educational Establishments
Regular deep-tine aeration,accompanied by verti-cutting and scarification, help to keep Hartpury’s eight natural turf pitches free- draining and fit for high levels of use
“ 96 I PC JUNE/JULY 2014
Hartpury Sport has produced more than 100 international rugby players over the past decade, as well as a number of professional footballers and golfers
End-o season of-s
maintenance of our main pitches needs to be planned very carefully during the few weeks available to us when no competitive sport is taking place
helped give Hartpury an increasingly higher profile, helped by the growing number of students the college is attracting from the UK and overseas to study subjects including sports business management, sports coaching, physical education, sports conditioning and injury management, sports performance and a wealth of other related subjects. The list grows bigger year by year. In addition to the six natural turf and two
synthetic 3G pitches used by the college’s sports studies students for formal education, training and matches, the college has two additional natural turf pitches dedicated for use by Aviva Premiership side, Gloucester Rugby, whose first team training base has been located at Hartpury for close on ten years, helping forge ever-closer links between college and its local rugby club. On the playing field, students representing Hartpury Rugby have achieved many major successes in college league and cup competitions over the past decade, with more than one hundred former students going on to represent their countries on the international stage, playing in Six Nations Championships and competitions further afield. Football, too, plays a very important part within the sports’ curriculum with Hartpury
actively supporting the playing and coaching development programmes of both Cheltenham Town and Gloucester City Football Clubs. The college maintains close ties also with
Forest Green Rovers, Hereford United, Swindon Town, Bristol Rovers and Newport County.
College football teams have won a
succession of important national inter-school and college competitions and former students have gone on to secure professional playing contracts with clubs in the UK and abroad, as well as taking up posts within sports-related areas. The honours boards at Hartpury College show no signs of gathering dust, thanks to the high standards pursued by the teaching, coaching and administrative staff, together with the superb condition and presentation of the college’s playing surfaces and grounds. All grounds maintenance operations are carried out by two teams overseen by Head of Horticulture, Mark Harwood-Browne. Mark took on responsibility for the
grounds in 2010 and for sports turf in 2012, when former head groundsman, Stewart Ward, left to join local football club, Forest Green Rovers. Modestly describing Hartpury’s sports
pitch maintenance regime as “surprisingly basic”, Mark is supported by two skilled professional groundsmen in ensuring that the college’s ten sports pitches and surrounding green areas are kept at the highest possible standard. The three-man ‘Sports Turf’ team, led by
Tony Hawker, is responsible for looking after all football and rugby playing surfaces, both natural turf and synthetic 3G, the latter having a rubber crumb infill. This team also maintains a golf driving
range and short game area with fine-turf putting green, all of which need to be presented at a high level for use by students selected for the college’s golf programme and striving for elevation to the elite and elite development squads. The second team, tagged ‘Amenity
Grounds and Sports Turf’, comprises six staff
headed by Matthew Newman who, in addition to coordinating the two grounds teams, acts as Mark’s deputy. This team has responsibility for maintaining all non-playing areas across the site, which include planted borders, lawns, amenity grass, roadways and verges.
Although the latter team’s working area
rarely extends onto sports turf, Mark explained that an amenity mower is able to straddle a touchline or trim the grass behind the goals if its height of cut setting is appropriate.
“We don’t impose strict demarcation
lines,” he said. “Depending on workloads, tasks such as grass-cutting can be shared, as can other jobs such as painting, groundworks or fencing.” The year-round budgetary pressures faced by a wholly self-governing, self-financing college such as Hartpury, mean that on-site student accommodation is very rarely found empty. Capable of housing more than 1,000
students during term times, the hostel blocks are occupied during vacations by those attending language schools, sports training camps and equine competitions, amongst other events. In similar manner to the staff responsible
for managing and filling the college’s hostel accommodation, Mark is striving constantly to make maximum use of the sports pitches under his control. “Just like a high level rugby or football club, end-of-season maintenance of our main pitches needs to be planned very carefully during the few weeks available to us when no competitive sport is taking place. It’s no easy task.” The sentiment behind that statement
becomes crystal clear when Mark points out that Hartpury College fields twenty competitive football and rugby teams and is represented in seventeen different leagues and cup competitions around the county and country. As a result, the college’s six grass pitches and two 3G synthetic surfaces could be in use on any day of the week, and also at weekends, for forty-five weeks of the year.
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