Robot makes its mark at Worksop College

Worksop College is a leading educational institution located in the United Kingdom, offering a wide range of academic and sporting programmes to its students.

Like many schools and universities, maintaining well-marked sports pitches is an important part of ensuring that their athletes can compete at their best. However, manually line marking these large outdoor surfaces can be timeconsuming and labour intensive, presenting a significant challenge for the college’s groundskeeping staff.

In order to improve their operations and provide their athletes with top quality playing fields, Worksop College recently invested in a Turf Tank line marking robot. This cutting-edge technology allows the college to quickly and accurately mark their pitches, saving time and effort while maintaining the high standards that their athletes and coaches’ demand.

In addition to serving the needs of the college’s own athletic programmes, Worksop College also rents out its sports pitches to outside organisations, which became an important source of revenue. Chris explains that without the Turf Tank line marking robot, it would be difficult for the college to accommodate these external bookings, as the time and effort required to manually mark the pitches would be prohibitive.

“If we just did it with string lines and a roller, you know, it’s probably two to three hours. With the robot - it’s 20 minutes. It’s done. It’s always programmed in. So now when they tell us that they’re coming up this weekend, we just send the robot down and get it to mark that pitch whenever it is needed. No problem.”

“If we get requested on a Monday morning at nine o’clock we’ll have a pitch there for Monday morning at 11 o’clock,” explained Matthew Binns, Grounds Foreman.

Apart from making the line marking process hassle-free and allowing the college to fulfil these requests, the robot also has another great advantage over its manual counterpart - the accuracy.

“Turf Tank works everything out perfectly for us. Everything’s symmetrical, every time. Before, obviously, if you’re doing freehand you’re never ever going to get it as perfect as you are, with the Turf Tank. It’s all GPS. It’s all perfect every time,” said Matthew.

The staff at the college is thrilled that they can provide even more than perfect pitches.

They can use it to mark letters and special messages in the grass, that can help to create a more professional and impressive appearance for the pitches , making them stand out and providing a memorable experience for the teams and spectators.

“We also do little messages around the school every now and again,” Chris explained.

“We did some prize giving, we put that on a piece of grass. We put welcome back messages on the front of the lawns and things like that.”

“Like the guys for Joe Root. We didn’t tell them we were doing it. And we just did it. And they spent most of their time photographing their logo and tweeting about it. So it just gives them a little bit more ownership.” n Curious how to turn your line marking robot into a source of income? Book a demo.

By offering its sports pitches in a timely manner, at a high level of quality, and with the added value of special messages in the grass, Worksop College is able to provide an exceptional experience for the teams that rent their facilities. As a result, these teams and organisations are likely to return in the future, and to spread the word about the college’s outstanding services to others.

The Turf Tank line marking robot proved to be essential for Worksop College’s operations, not only improving the efficiency of their line marking process, but also helping to build a thriving business that benefits the college, its students, other teams, and the wider community.