Headland programme reaps rewards, and awards, for Hamworthy Sports Club

By Alistair June 7, 2019 06:12 Updated

The significant improvement in the condition of the multi-sport facilities at Dorset’s Hamworthy Sports Club has largely been put down to a nutritional regime suggested by Headland Amenity. Such is the progression in uniformity and quality achieved across the football, cricket and golf surfaces that head groundsman Gavin Fisher has been awarded Dorset FA Groundsman of the Year and Dorset Cricket Groundsman of the Year – for the second season in a row!

Gavin has been at the club for six and a half years and is solely in charge of the turf maintenance – a busy site that’s home to Hamworthy Cricket Club and Hamworthy Recreation FC. “When I joined the club, the feeding programme I inherited clearly wasn’t working,” he explains. “The golf greens in particular were suffering from disease, patchy coverage and just a general lack of growth. While I had no previous experience of Headland or their products, their sportsturf specialist Alex Hawkes stopped by and we got on straight away. He took some soil samples and spent time going through the product range to formulate a programme that would be effective site-wide.”

For Gavin, one of the biggest challenges has been to create a programme to improve surfaces, while sticking to a very tight budget. “Alex fully understood that we needed versatility from the products, that could perform not only on different playing surfaces, but adapt to weather conditions and other environmental pressures.” Key to the programme has been Headland’s ‘20/20/30’ Enhanced Plant Health strategy.

“We apply this tank-mix across both the golf and cricket surfaces every month. It is used in conjunction with various analysis’ of Xtend® slow-release fertiliser which we can tweak as the seasons change and TriCure AD™ Granular on our golf greens, to deliver more uniform water distribution, which has helped us cope without an automatic irrigation system.”

“We also use Xtend® on the football pitch, together with Multigreen® temperature-controlled release fertiliser, which we apply once early in the season and then again in the autumn. The beauty with the programme we have is, though it has largely remained the same in the last few years, we have the flexibility with Alex’s knowledge to make adjustments here or there if we think we can achieve even better results. We are now reaping the rewards of our investment, having made real strides with the health, appearance and playability of our sports surfaces.”