A wet Saturday in November
At 8am the groundsman walks the recreation ground and decides the lower pitch is waterlogged. He rings the clerk, who is not at work on Saturdays, then texts the town council's facilities officer. Nobody is quite sure which clubs are using the lower pitch today. The under-11s? The adult Sunday league team moved their fixture to Saturday this week, didn't they? By 9.30 the visiting team's coach is already on the road.
During the week it is a different kind of muddle. The season allocation was agreed at a meeting in the summer and lives in a spreadsheet. The clubs send their fixtures in whenever the league publishes them. A company wants the upper pitch for a charity match, and a school asks about the cricket square for sports day. Each request is checked against a spreadsheet that may or may not have the latest fixtures in it.
Why pitch bookings get complicated
Pitches are not booked like a hall. A club gets an allocation for the season, then fills it with fixtures that arrive in batches and change when the league reschedules. Changing rooms, pitch marking and floodlights need to follow the fixtures. And the weather can take a pitch away at short notice, which affects everyone booked on it.
| Type of booking | How it arrives | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Season allocation | Agreed at committee before the season | Pitch capacity and the council's pitch policy |
| League fixtures | Emailed by club secretaries in batches | The league's fixture list, which changes |
| One-off hire | Enquiry to the office | What is left after fixtures |
| Training slots | Agreed with the club, often informally | Floodlights and pitch wear |
| Closures | The groundsman's call on the day | Weather and pitch condition |
What it costs when it goes wrong
Teams turn up to closed pitches, and clubs blame the council. Pitches get overplayed because training sessions were never written down, which shows in the goalmouths by February. Changing rooms are left locked for a match nobody told the key holder about. Pitch fees are missed because a rescheduled fixture was never invoiced. And the clerk or facilities officer spends Friday afternoons fielding emails from club secretaries trying to work out what is booked.
A pitch calendar clubs and staff share
- Each pitch, the cricket square, the changing rooms and the floodlights are set up as bookable resources, with the council's season dates.
- The season allocation agreed at committee is entered as blocks per club, per pitch.
- Club secretaries log in and add fixtures into their own allocation, with kick-off, age group and opponents. Changes and postponements are made the same way.
- Anything outside the allocation, such as an extra training night or a one-off hire, comes in as a request for the facilities officer to approve.
- Changing rooms and floodlights are linked to the fixtures that need them, so the key holder's list is always current.
- When the groundsman closes a pitch, he marks it closed on his phone for a date or a time range. Every club with a fixture on it gets an email and a text, through a service such as Twilio, and the closure shows on the public calendar.
- Pitch fees are calculated from the fixtures actually played and invoiced to each club monthly or at season end, as your policy sets.
Match day, with the calendar running
The groundsman closes the lower pitch at 8am from his phone. By 8.05 both clubs using it have a text, and the visiting team's coach can be told before they leave. The facilities officer sees the closure on Monday morning with a list of fixtures to rearrange. Club secretaries stop emailing to check what is booked because they can see it themselves.
At the end of the season, the committee reviewing next year's allocation can see how each pitch was actually used, which fixtures were lost to closures and which clubs used more than they were allocated.
Is this your recreation ground?
- The season allocation lives in a spreadsheet updated by hand.
- Fixtures arrive by email from each club secretary.
- Closures are passed on by phone calls and texts on a Saturday morning.
- Training sessions are agreed informally and not recorded.
- Pitch fees are worked out at season end from memory and emails.