these Open Championship Clubs choose to relief grind - Pitchcare

Summer Sports - Bowls
When it comes to ‘The
Green’, Crown Green
Bowlers are a notoriously
difficult group to please -
ask one hundred bowlers
for an opinion and you
will almost certainly
receive one hundred
different responses. So,
how does the bowls
greenkeeper attempt to
meet the expectations of
the club membership? In
fact, how does he even
know what those
expectations are?
Mark Allen, of Amenity
Land Solutions, seeks out
the answers from two of
the best bowls
greenkeepers in the
Birmingham area
My first position of responsibility
within turfcare came in the
early 1990s. As a keen Crown
Green bowler with a leading
Birmingham club, my long
summer university vacation provided the
seasonal free time to help out as an
unpaid ‘grass cutter’.
Despite a thirst for knowledge, it was
difficult to find any information at all on
bowls greenkeeping P.I. (pre-internet). My
education was derived from golf-based
literature, the odd friendly salesman (yes,
odd and friendly in that order!) and some
rather questionable bowls green folk-law.
Notwithstanding the clubs position at the
pinnacle of the Midlands bowls scene, a
clutch of County players within the ranks
and a regular venue for cup finals and
inter-county matches, the maintenance of
the green was entrusted to a nineteen year
old novice - a ‘willing soldier’, but lacking
anything resembling ‘experience’. I now
realise that a willing soldier is usually the
best that most bowls clubs can hope to
attract - anything resembling experience
is a bonus.
At that time, when it came to the
bowling green, the mentality of the
membership was very much one of ‘shave
it short and make it fly’ - which was okay,
up to a point. However, that point was
reached in the drought year of 1995,
when we shaved it short and watched it
die!
So followed a couple of years of hard
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
work, mixed in with a fair amount of luck
(how we all need that) but, most
importantly, a genuine interest in the
subject. Eventually, a surface was
produced that we could all be proud of,
given the minimal kit and meagre budget
... and we were one of the better-off clubs!
My overriding memory of that era was
trying to convince the membership that
the green didn’t need to turn yellow to be
a ‘good home green’.
The situation today is much better -
certainly the majority of top flight clubs in
the Warwickshire and Worcestershire
County Bowling Association (Greater
Birmingham’s largest bowls league) have
excellent playing surfaces, and the ‘cut it
short’ mentality has been replaced with a
far more enlightened approach.
Knowing many of the bowls guys well, I
recently took the opportunity to catch up
with a couple of them, to get their views
on managing not only their greens but
also the expectations of their
membership.
My first call was to the much-admired
George Bowling Club at Warley.
Straddling on the Birmingham /Black
country border, ‘The G-men’ have been
the Midlands team to beat for at least the
last twenty years. The man charged with
giving them a surface to match their
reputation, Eric Winstone, cuts a
formidable figure around the club. A
former Warwick & Worcester County
player, Eric has strong views on
Perfection - and the
better it is, the better!