August top tips
These top tips will be largely applicable for the start of the season.
- Share your expertise with other volunteers
Share your grass pitch maintenance knowledge with players, club officers, coaches, parents and outside parties so everyone understands how to keep the pitches in good condition.
Attend club meetings, send emails or have a chat with everyone at the club about your top tips on how to get the pitch match fit. Keep your points simple, avoid getting into the technical aspects of maintaining the pitch, and use analogies to help to get your point across. A couple of examples might be;
- If a player is constantly training and playing games without any chance for recovery they’ll break down and not be able to perform at their peak; the same is true of a pitch. A balance has to be struck to keep pitches in a fit state so rotate playing areas and lighten the load of high-use zones.
- If a player is training and playing games whilst not eating and drinking enough or fuelling themselves with the right things they will perform poorly or get injured; the same can be true of grass. Especially under the stress of games and training, grass needs adequate fertilisation to perform at its best.
- Move play around
Communicate as soon as you can if certain pitches would benefit from a rest or if certain areas of the pitch need a rest, only of course if you have the luxury of rotating pitches.
If you have a pitch that is used for training, there are a number of things you can do to manage its’ wear.
- If you have portable goals, you can move them to carry out shooting and crossing drills down a touchline rather than the 18-yard box.
- Small sided activities can take place in the corner of the pitch.
- You can split a full-size pitch to fit a 5×5 pitch in each of the four corners of the pitch. If each of these are used for two hours a week, it means an even spread of wear across the entire pitch, this will be the difference between a whole pitch getting 2 hours use or one area getting 8 hours use.
- Look after your goalposts
If your club has multiple teams and age groups, management of the use and storage of goalposts is key for maintaining your grass pitch. Having a good relationship and communication with the club coaches and players makes life a lot easier when it comes to moving and managing your goalposts.
If a lot of training takes place on your site, portable self-weighted wheeled goalposts, that can be easily moved around, make a big difference. They mean that the pitch can be maintained unimpeded when not in use. Another benefit is that they can be moved and secured to off pitch areas, which reduces the risk of unofficial usage and damage to goal mouths.
It may sound simple, but five minutes spent by players and coaches getting goals out and putting them away will save a lot of time, compared to one or two volunteers repeating the process potentially across multiple pitches.
- Simple record keeping
For all of us and especially volunteers, time is at a premium so here’s some tips to speed up your admin work. Simple record keeping can save plenty of time in the long run and can prove very useful as the season progresses.
- Keeping a record of pitch use can be extremely useful. Split the pitch into quadrants and record the use in each area.
- A simple maintenance log can also help you out a lot. This is especially handy for recording less frequent tasks, such as aeration, decompaction and fertilisation, and making year on year comparisons to see what has worked well and what hasn’t.
- With England’s notoriously damp summers, recording rainfall can be useful at any time of year.
- Plan ahead to save you time
As we prepare for the grassroots season to begin, now is the time to think ahead and start planning some of the pro-active tasks that will keep your pitch in tip top condition for the winter months. Relevant tasks might include over-seeding, sand dressing, deep spiking and granular fertilisation . Things you may need to consider could include:
- Have you got the required materials in stock or lined up for delivery?
- Do you need to organise equipment hire?
- Are contractors booked in?
It might feel early to start focusing on ‘winter’ tasks, but prevention is always better than cure, and they will all be more successful if carried out before a problem emerges.