Educational Establishments
Marking out for rugby
What is the total acreage and how is this split up?
We have two sites with a combined area of fifty-two acres. Stoughton Road has thirty acres (increasing to thirty-six from summer 2015). Here, we have five football pitches, three rugby pitches, two cricket squares and outfields, one lacrosse pitch, one American football pitch, four artificial cricket pitches, and a geophysics field. Our second site at Manor Road has twenty-two acres, accommodating one rugby pitch, one football pitch, one artificial hockey pitch, one 3G 5-a-side football pitch, eight hard tennis courts, three artificial tennis courts and various landscaped areas, including a pond.
Does the facility suffer from any regular natural occurrences and how do you cope with these?
We have very high winds at the Stoughton Road site due to being surrounded by fields and being quite high up. Touch wood, in recent years, we have had very little snow and not much frost; we have been very lucky.
The wind has its pros and cons. The positive side is that we have very little disease on our turf as it is so open, whilst being ‘gusty’ also
means the pitches dry out very quickly after rainfall, which is a godsend.
A couple of cons are the cricket sight screens, which are a nightmare when it’s windy. We have to anchor them down a lot and take the PVC slats out after every cricket match. And we also have to make regular checks on the posts (rugby, football, American football,) just to make sure they are safe and the wind hasn’t taken its toll ... and, when we are working in the middle of the field, it can be absolutely freezing!
Our hard tennis courts have an issue with air flow and shade; it’s the perfect breeding ground for moss, an issue we have to be on top of constantly as the area can become very slippery.
What are your maintenance regimes?
Every Monday morning we have a half an hour sit down and go through the work that needs doing for the week ahead. A typical week will consist of getting the two sites mown - our winter games pitches at 25mm, and the outfields, in the summer, at 17mm. The artificial pitches are prepped, natural pitches are aerated, using either a Sisis Megaslit or Multislit, and brushed after any games with a Sisis Litamina. We will then
The new tennis courts
mark out. We concentrate on preparing the pitches that will be in use for the Wednesday fixtures first, then sort out the rest after - everything is weather dependent, of course.
I have a written monthly plan on the board for bigger jobs, e.g. verti-cutting pitches with the Dennis mowers, verti-draining, feeding, spraying, external tournaments and any projects that will need doing. We have hundreds of trees around our sites so, in autumn, we spend a huge amount of time clearing leaves; a thankless job!
We spend half an hour at the end of every day cleaning, greasing and prepping machines ready for the next day; this is very important, as we have minimal equipment and we can’t afford to lose any to bad maintenance.
I will generally do any fertilising myself, with help from Thomas. We do it all with an Everris Accupro 2000 so, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of walking. We are currently using Everris Sierrablen Plus which has four to five month longevity. Of all the fertilisers we have used over the years, this has given us, by far, the best results.
With Chris and Tom keeping on top of the winter pitches and astro maintenance
PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015 I 71
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