By Nick Creely

The Bathurst City Council Sports Field Team, led by supervisor Guy Hammond, had the opportunity to showcase its elite facilities at Carrington Park last Saturday when the multi-purpose stadium hosted an NRL fixture between the Penrith Panthers and Newcastle Knights. Hammond and his team of eight look after all sporting grounds in Bathurst in Central West New South Wales which has a population of more 40,000. 

The Knights prevailed 25-6 in front of a crowd of 12,000, with Hammond thrilled with how the surface presented and played. “I thought it went really well, it was a good event for the team,” he said. “It played fast, it looked really good on TV I thought and we got some really good feedback from supporters and both teams which was super positive.”

Hammond said the process of getting the Carrington Park playing surface to NRL standards came down to a lot of preparation, maintenance and dedication, not only during the week but in the months leading in. Carrington Park has hosted at least one NRL game every year since 2014 with Penrith involved in all those fixtures.

“We put a lot of focus on Carrington for the week obviously, but it probably changed in the last eight weeks or so,” he said of their preparations. “We had a two month plan when we knew the NRL was coming in order to manage the usage pre-NRL.”

Hammond said monitoring the climate and managing the turf was essential to ensuring the surface was in elite condition. “It changes our maintenance program. We’re on couchgrass, and in March we oversow with ryegrass to keep the couch as healthy as possible. That was our biggest thing to nail, getting the couch right in the off-season,” he said.

“In Bathurst it’s a cooler climate compared to the coastal areas, we can get extremely low temps. We’ve been really happy with the last four weeks of prep, whether with the fertilisation, aeration treatments, all being mindful of the weather with a lot of rain around.

“We worked around that knowing it wasn’t going to be ideal conditions so we had to prepare for that but with the aeration and soil penetrant work done, we thought it all went really well.”

Hammond said he’d like to see more elite sport played in the region, with Carrington Park capable of hosting professional rugby league, rugby union and soccer matches. 

“We’d like to see as many NRL games or A-League games as possible, we want to support it in our region and we want to showcase our surface as much as possible. We want teams to play on high-quality turf and more importantly safe surfaces. We’re doing a good job as a team to ensure that happens.”

Images courtesy of Guy Hammond