Summer Sports - Tennis
We show them a PowerPoint presentation, which runs through where they should be on a court and what they should be moving at any given time in the process
Cover goes on to Centre Court to protect it from the rain
thorough induction and training process with all staff to ensure that they are fully up to speed by the time the tournament begins. This starts either on their first day of work, or prior to their first day of work. This covers everything they need to know for a standard day, including all the necessary health and safety information! However, the area we have really
developed our training on in recent years has been around the use of the court covers. On TV, it probably looks quite simple; run on the court and pull the cover! However, it is far from straightforward in practice. Every court has a mountain of furniture to be removed prior to pulling the cover on. In addition, we don’t have enough staff to have a designated team for each court, so there are three teams who have to work separately, but simultaneously, in order to get the courts covered as quickly as possible. Whilst they don’t work directly together, when covers go on, one team making a mistake can slow down the team following up behind, so plans have to be executed very precisely. In fact, we have been described as having worked to ‘military precision,’ so we guess our forward planning is working! In order to get to the point where covers go on with such precision, we run training
sessions with each team, where we show them a PowerPoint presentation, which runs through where they should be on a court and what they should be moving at any given time in the process. Then, weather permitting, we take the teams down to the courts to practice, and practice, and then practice some more! Of course, that’s weather permitting! This year’s team didn’t have the luxury of practising in advance, as the weather was against us, meaning we never had a chance to run through the plans on court. In our eyes, which made it all the more impressive this year that the covers went on as quickly as they did. Of course, with such a large team of people, keeping morale high is massively important, especially as we rely on the court covering team most when the weather is against us. On paper, it should be a pretty miserable job. That’s perhaps where ensuring a good team spirit and a strong camaraderie between the full time staff and the temporary team, as well as amongst the temporary staff themselves, is vital. We do a number of things to try and
breed this type of environment. We firmly believe in leading by example and, if that means getting ourselves soaking wet and covered in every type of dirt imaginable,
then that is what we do. We never ask someone to do a job we won’t do ourselves first.
That said, we also try to have fun with the
temporary team. We are all working over one-hundred hours a week, and so it is important to try and make the job enjoyable. Over the last few years, our team challenges have begun to gain some notoriety! This year, there were whole Battenburg cakes, apple pies covered in cream, and our personal favourite - the donut challenge! For the uninitiated, the donut challenge
involves everyone having a sugared donut placed in front of them. Everyone starts at the same time and the rules are simple. No using hands and no licking lips - the winner being the first to finish! In reality, the winner is irrelevant, the important thing is simple things like this break down barriers between people - it’s strangely easier to find common ground to talk on when you look completely ridiculous with bits of sugar, jam and donut all over your face! This probably all sound like it has little
relevance to the grass courts, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s much easier to focus on what we need to do with the courts when we know we have a good team that we can trust behind us and, this
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PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 I 59
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