Interview with Eddie Seaward, Head Groundsman AELTC

by Alicia Priestley

A what is your job?

My job is primarily to look after the grass courts to make sure they are ready for members and the championships. That doesn’t just mean the grass itself it also means the canvases, all the furniture around. In addition to that we are also looking after the car park areas and other grass areas and also working with the long-term plan, so it is quite varied.

A so with the grass, how would keep it looking so green and short?

The grass is a whole year round situation and performance. We have to start in the autumn when play is finished and as you probably have seen the courts are a little bit worn and the areas are bare etc so at that stage we currently take off most of the grass with a machine , then we can aerate the soil which is to spike it and get a lot of air into it because we have rolled it very hard during the summer and we need to get the bacteria activity going and the right type of activity so we need oxygen back into it, so we aerate it and pump at lot of holes into it with that .once that is done we put new seed on to it, cover it with a bit of soil and within two or three weeks hopefully the grass is growing again and we can carry on mowing

A So you plant seed and not put ready made grass down?

We plant seeds wherever we can. We do have some turf growing in Yorkshire, but if you put turf down it is liable to crack at the joins when the court dries, so it is much better to put seed in wherever possible. it is also cheaper as well and you can get exactly what you want in the way of the grass cultivars and the type of grass that you want as well,

A How did you get into this kind of work?

I got into it from school I had a careers master who knew me better than I knew myself, really and I vacancy came up a local fee paying school, which I got the job from there. That is how I started in the job and I was there for twelve years before I moved on to take up head groundsman at other sports fields. before I came here.

A During the championships what are your main responsibilities?

The main responsibilities are to make sure the courts are capped and ready for play every day and working with the umpire, who are the referees rather if it is a wet day we are looking at covering the courts. If it is a nice dry day I probably don’t see the referee all day, but if it is a wet day I see him quite a lot. But it really is trying to make sure the courts are there ready for play every morning. And I go see the referee every morning just to say the courts are ready for him and then hand them over to him for the championships for the day

A So when it does rain, is it very important to keep the covers on?

Yeh, If the court get wet it gets soft and then the ball wont bounce very much which is a problem but also if it gets wet and slippery then the players could injure themselves that’s why we tend to cover very very quickly when it does come on to rain knowing that if we cover then we can hopefully get the play back into operation quicker when it is finished.

A With the courts in the rest of the year, how do you protect it from animals, insects and birds? Foxes?

It is a whole range of different of things here. With insects and therefore they attract the birds. We don’t tend to protect it very much because they are very hard and the courts are very hard, then you don’t get a lot of insect problem or worm problem. It is only in the autumn or the spring that you get that scenario coming about. If we find that we are getting an insect damage we can normally tell because that is when the birds will start pecking in the grass and digging it up and then we will spray an insecticide to kill the insects off. We will only do that if we have really got to because it is not very good for the climate to spray just for the sake of it we are very cautious in what we do .With foxes, they tend to get on the courts and if they urinate on the courts they can cause damage, so with Centre and One we have got the electric fences around them to keep the foxes off and the outside courts we don’t worry about so much, because there are more people moving around, so the foxes tend to get disturbed all the time and don’t go there. So it is the show courts are the ones we have to protect because they are quiet. And as far as worms are concerned there is nothing much you can do these days because chemicals have been withdrawn from the market. You can put a little bit of a fungicide down which will protect it against the worms for a few weeks .It won’t actually eradicate the worms, but it will make them go further down into the ground. Other than that, the courts are again in the summer are so hard we don’t have any trouble with that.

A What has been the best bit about your job? What do you most enjoy about it?

I think the best bit about the job is that unlike most jobs you’re into a conveyor belt and you are part of a production or whatever. Whereas this job you see it through from the autumn work we were talking about to the championships then day one hopefully you can say this is where we got to and the courts look good and pristine and I this is what we have achieved and that is the great thing that you can actually see what you have achieved every year.

A What about the Olympics coming up?

The Olympics are currently three weeks after the championships and we have a problem therein that we have to get to get the courts back into pristine condition very very quickly. Now when we had the film Wimbledon shot here a few years ago again we had a three week period between the shooting of the film and the end of the tournament and we were at that time aware that we may have the Olympics here if the British bid was successful , so we used that as a trail run .We can actually do some work with the seed we can pre germinate it before hand, so it is growing by the time we sow it and then within a few days it will be up and it will be looking ok .What it will be is a bit superficial in that it will wear off fairly quickly …but on day one it will look good…We are really quite confident that we can do that .There are other things with the Olympics that we still have to explore because we don’t know who the referee is going to be yet and I am sure we won’t for a couple of years yet and things like canvasses and television companies and who we are dealing with and canvasses around the court, so they are going to need to be changed .So we’ve got advertising around the courts like we have for the Davis Cup .Those are still things we have yet to work on and to deal with. Simply it is just too early for everybody to concentrate on at the moment. I am hoping they will very shortly, to be quite honest because one of the things with the job if the fact that it seems a long time away yet with the Olympics in 2012 .It seems another five years away but for us with because of all the work with the championships and everything else going on in the long term plan, we have probably only got about eighteen months of free time to work on the next five years, so we need to start concentrating on getting that done. So the courts we are fairly confident we will get done.

What we will also do with the court is normally when we do this sort of renovation we leave it for a week after the championship before we start. The reason being that a lot of the staff are very tired because they worked a lot of hours, so we give them a break. Beforehand, before we get back into it, because people that are tired don’t do such a good job as people that are not tired. But with this one we will have to get straight into it so as the players walk off the court and the public go after the final of the championships we will start work immediately by watering the courts and coming in the next day sowing the court down and getting it ready again, so it will be continual right the way through on that one. I gather we need ten latch courts for that plus some practice courts ,so while it is very high profile we do not need as many courts as we do for the main Championship, so there are a few things to look out on that one Alicia at the moment, but hopefully in the next eighteen months we will be there, but we know what we need, the questions we need to ask. It is a bit like you’ve done there; we have a list of questions ready to fire at people when the time comes on that one. So that we can hopefully get all the answers that we need fairly quickly .The Olympics also are currently looking at possibly building some practice courts in the north of London at the Olympics village to stop the players coming over here to practice. Save them all the traveling all the time .We have had a few discussions with how they are going to build the courts over there, but we are not yet a hundred percent sure whether they are going to build courts there in the end of the day? I suspect they won’t, that they will come here for practice. That is something we are still waiting for at this moment. So it’s all being planned and it’s being worked on ,but it is a little way away yet before we get all the answers that we need,

So are you happy to play in the Olympics then?!

A Oh I don’t know I am not sure yet!

So do you play much tennis?

A I play three or four times a week in the winter but more in the more in the summer. I play here with the WJTI on Saturdays then I play two days a week in a club, Spencer LTC, nearer me.

What I should also say with the courts, in the summer, is that we need to make sure the courts are very hard and dry, so that is the reason we put the covers on before the Championships start to get the moisture out and it is a bit like the soil, the soil is a clay type of soil in the courts, so it’s a bit like making a brick ,in the old way where they used to put the clay out in the sun to bake it, well we will let the sun bake the clay to get it very, very hard. We can only roll it so hard and after that it won’t go any harder by rolling. It is just a myth that people think about at times that you can keep on pushing and pushing a roller on to it. It won’t make any difference, but if we take the moisture out it will get harder and harder and we need it to get harder. As you can appreciate if you play tennis if the ball is coming at you fast and it is up at chest height you have a chance to return it from the server, but if the ball is down around your ankles the chances of returning the serve are pretty remote. So, that is what we are looking for and what we are aiming for. During the Championships we measure the courts every day for hardness and measure them for soil moisture. And we look at the wear of the grass, the wear of the grass is really something we can look at after the Championships. We need to take the measurement on a daily basis, then we can review what type of grasses we are using .Are we using the right type of grass? Do we need to do something else to the grass to make it survive longer? The hardness is really for the ball bounce at the time and also it gives us an early warning, because being clay soil if it gets too dry too hard it will crack. So this is balance. You have to get a little bit of moisture into the court, but still have it hard. When we get to a certain reading we know that we get to with a machine that we use, then we know we are likely to get cracking and that when we have to start putting more water on. That is why if you came in here on the middle Sunday, you would normally see the water going quite a lot that day. We can’t water much during the Championship because I has got to be dry the next day, but on the Sunday we have twenty four hours to put a little bit of water down and dry the courts out .So we can use a little bit more water and get it down into the base so that. It’s a fun job, but it is very much related to the weather.

At the moment we are spraying – have been spraying today with a fungicide, as there are one or two diseases that could kill the grass off and wipe it out very quickly .Normally again we don’t spray because of cost and the environment, but at this time of year when people are going to be away on holiday for Christmas then we spray as a preventative and it is only once or twice that we spray regularly in the whole year. We do it just before we put the covers on because that also creates the conditions when these fungus diseases can arise, so being hot and humid. You may not think it is very hot at the moment, but in between the grass leaf it gets quite hot and with the dampness around it can get very humid, so the diseases can come through very quickly.

A all the time you have been working have there been any disasters which have happened?

There have been no great disasters ,there have been one or two things that we wish had not happened .Quite a few years ago in 1990 when up in Number One court- 1991 sorry, we had tarpaulin covers on and we had three days of continual rain and the court was ok on Day One, but after three days with these tarpaulin covers on they became very lush, because the grass leaves were looking for light, so it became very green and as soon as you took the covers off you knew you had a problem and the players were slipping around for a few days until it dried out again. That is we changed the covers to a different type of material where light still gets through, so we should not have that problem again.

This last year, we are always working a few weekends before the tournament as well every day and we came in the Saturday, ten days before the Championship and everything looked very good, quite happy with it, went home and came back in on the Sunday and one court had gone completely black because it had a disease into the grass .We managed to kill the disease off and get the grass to grow .We knew what we had to do. We sprayed a chemical to kill the disease, but then it was still black .So we had to force the grass to grow by putting the covers on which acts like a green house, getting it to grow and so you could see the green shoots coming up at the base and we mowed it off we mowed the black off. And by a couple of days before the tournament you would never have known it was there! So we got away with that one ok, simply because we kept an eye on what we were doing and we could recognize the disease that came in very quickly. And that’s the problem, it can come in over night, it only takes a few hours for a disease to happen, so that is the reason. So we have not had any major disasters, other than that. It goes quite well because we work on it all the time and we constantly monitor it and look at it and we are very fussy. And the guys that work around me are very very fussy as well and in fact they will see a little blemish and report it back very quickly ,because get worried at that time of year. The pressure is on everybody.

A Is there anything you don’t like about the job?

No, with the grass etc it is great. There is nothing I don’t like about the job .I enjoy the work very much actually, there are obviously some things on the some of the administration side that may not be so easy as you would hope, but that is dealing with people and we have just gone through the normal period of reviews and assessment and appraisals so it is a part of the job you have to do, but it is part of the job that I don’t like so much, but we all get things that we don’t like doing life which we still have to do .You have to do your homework, but you probably don’t like doing that either, but I enjoy the job very much and always have.

A Is there anything else you would like to say?

I don’t think there is anything else to say, I think we have covered most of the things I think the only thing at this time of the year that is probably interesting is the fact that we are now planning for the Championships and we had a staff of fourteen full time grounds man which are then supplemented by another fourteen for the Championship, because we just don’t have enough people to do it all at one time. It would be wrong to employ another fourteen full time because we don’t need them in here the whole time and I would not know what to do with them. So they come in for the summer and they come in from all over the world. So we are just going through that recruitment at the moment, we are almost there. Soon after Christmas all the contracts will be going out to these other people that we are going to involve next year. Today I had meetings with other suppliers and contractors, signing contracts and getting contracts ready. So we are already working on this coming tournament .It just doesn’t happen ,there are a lot of things to plan in advance and immediately after the tournament we will have reviews with a lot of the directors to make sure that everything went ok and what can we improve for next year, and there is always something you can improve for next year, it does not matter how many times you have been doing it, something will crop up, you think yes if one of you did this we could improve it for the following year. Which is what we have got to do all the time, is keep on moving forward all the time and improving it. Just to see how it goes. I hear you interviewed Tim Henman a while ago?

A- I am hoping to, but I haven’t yet, but I did interviewing Tim Phillips the Chairman a while ago

I just wondered because the players you will get a different reaction...it is always interesting to know how they feel about the courts, because one of the things we get during the Championships or the overseas weeks, when they are practicing, which is the time we get an opportunity to talk with the players a little bit and the coaches and you try to get a feel of how they think the courts are playing. Once the Championships start then you don’t get a lot of feedback, unless there is something dramatically wrong, which thankfully there isn’t because they are busy doing their job and you are doing your job and the players when they are in training are more relaxed and when they are playing they are in and out and gone again .So that is it , they tend not to want to talk much about the courts which I can understand entirely but we need to know what the feedback is so it is always nice to know so at the end of the day we are here to get the courts ready for them, but we want to know what they want because we have to try to give them what they want and obviously what the members want at other times of the year as well so just to make sure they are very satisfied with playing on the surface. As you know there is not a lot of grass courts left now, so it is essential we keep the players happy all the time and they go away with a good impression of the grass courts. That is not just here, but that is at practice as well, but at qualifying down at Roehampton players come and hit there. It is probably their first time on grass for some of them and maybe yourself and so they haven’t got a good impression of grass, so they go away thinking it is a terrible surface to play on so we have got a responsibility to make sure that they don’t feel that and they enjoy playing on it straight away. So I think that is about it really. Ok?

A Thank you

You are welcome.

Written by Alicia Priestley

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