AQUA SCIENCE research and production support and encourage the development and maintenance of well designed sports pitches that meet the needs of sports and are a pleasure to use. Sports pitches are required to be not only visually pleasing, but also provide a suitably thick and healthy turf grass surface to enable the chosen sport to be played under ideal conditions, providing opportunity for players to perform at their peak and without risk of injury.

Research has indicated that the quality of the sports pitch surface can have a direct bearing on the quality, skills and technique of players, pointing out that that a poorly prepared playing surface can have a seriously detrimental impact on both player development and performance, even within school going age groups.

Probably the most regular playing surface quality issues we encounter are:

• Limited and patchy turf growth,
• Dry, compacted and/or uneven soil surfaces,

Here in South Africa, we are all aware of hard, dry and dusty sports pitches that break up, making play erratic and injuries inevitable. These conditions are often caused by uneven water distribution due to the presence of water repellent or hydrophobic soils. Water repellency in soils supporting highly managed turf grass areas is a well known occurrence, and leads directly to irrigation inefficiency, excessive evaporation, and poor turf quality during hot dry periods in spring and summer, and during other periods of sports turf stress.

Hydrophobic, or water repellent soils, will not become uniformly wet. During rain or irrigation cycles water will either run off along the soil surface, or enter the soil only in irregular patches.