Pitchcare Magazine
Pitchcare Magazine is the magazine of Pitchcare, the Telford-based platform for groundsmen, greenkeepers and turfcare professionals across the United Kingdom. Described on the Pitchcare website as the industry's leading title and a respected platform for news, advice, experience and knowledge, the magazine is one part of a business that began as a free, independent website created by a professional groundsman and grew into the UK's longest established online supplier of turfcare products and a leading media site and publication. By the time its online edition listing reached Issue 128, Pitchcare Magazine had become the printed voice of a community that looks after everything from Premier League pitches and championship golf greens to grassroots sports grounds and school playing fields.
Born from a groundsman's passion
Pitchcare's own account of its story is disarmingly simple: it was born from the passion of a professional groundsman determined to impart knowledge and improve the standard of turfcare and sports grounds management. That founder was David Saltman, and what started as a free, independent website sharing expert insights became something much larger. The founding idea was educational. Groundsmanship had traditionally passed its knowledge person to person, from head groundsman to apprentice, and local experience did not always travel. A website that enlisted top grounds professionals, greenkeepers and specialists could make that expertise accessible to all, raising the profile of the industry while spreading good practice. The magazine grew from that platform, giving the online community a printed and downloadable title of its own, and the two have reinforced each other ever since: the website carries the daily flow of news, jobs and products, while the magazine offers longer features, interviews and technical depth.
From four staff to a national turfcare business
The growth of Pitchcare from a small website into a substantial business can be traced through the recollections of its early editor. Laurence Gale, a former parks manager who had re-educated himself with a master's degree in sports surface technology at Cranfield University, was headhunted by David Saltman to become editor of the magazine and joined in 2003, working alongside Saltman, John Richards and Alastair Battrick. Their aim was to offer a new membership vehicle for grounds professionals at a time when, as Gale recalled, there were only a couple of magazines supporting the industry. In the twelve years he served as editor, the company grew considerably, from an initial four full-time staff to a company of well over one hundred people. In 2020 Pitchcare, as part of the Maxwell Amenity group, was sold to Agrovista, the agricultural and amenity services group, a transaction that placed the title and its retail operation within a much larger horticultural business.
Telford base and a warehouse behind the words
Pitchcare is based in Telford, Shropshire; the magazine's published address in its earlier print era was Allscott Park, Allscott, Telford, and the wider business has long been headquartered in the town, with contact numbers and warehousing in the area. That physical base matters because Pitchcare is not only a publisher. Its own description notes more than 15,000 square metres of warehousing space and a specialism in turf and lawn fertiliser, grass seed and weed killers, backed by over a thousand sports turf, lawncare and groundcare products from premium and own-brand ranges, with options for every budget and surface, from Premier League and championship golf greens to grassroots pitches. The magazine is therefore written from inside the supply business as well as about it; when Pitchcare Magazine discusses fertiliser programmes, seed mixtures or disease control, its publisher sells the products in question, and its readers can move from an article to the store in a single visit.
What the magazine covers
Pitchcare Magazine's contents reflect the whole working life of the turf professional. Its features move between cultural techniques for managing grass, machinery developments and market innovations, to use the categories its publisher highlights. Typical issues have combined news, venue profiles and long interviews: a profile of a golf club's head greenkeeper setting out a five-year plan for a heathland course, a visit to the husband-and-wife team behind a modern cricket roller business in a rural corner of England, a report from a manufacturer's anniversary tour, and monthly guidance for the season ahead. The magazine's diary features were a distinctive institution, with monthly diaries written by named practitioners for their sports: bowls and rugby, cricket and football diarists recorded the real work of the month, from weather and disease pressure to renovation programmes, giving readers a peer-to-peer calendar against which to plan their own work.
Interviews with the people who prepare famous surfaces
Few things illustrate the magazine's access better than its interviews with the custodians of Britain's most famous turf. One issue featured Eddie Seaward, the long-serving head groundsman at Wimbledon, discussing the challenge of staging the Championships and the Olympic tennis tournament within weeks of each other, with only days before players began practising on the courts. Interviews of that kind, with head groundsmen at football clubs, cricket grounds, schools and golf courses, run through the magazine's history: a head groundsman at Carlisle United describing how he returned a pitch to playable condition after floods left the ground under eight feet of water, course managers explaining long-term projects, school groundsmen balancing elite expectations with educational budgets. These profiles serve a professional purpose, transferring knowledge between venues, but they also give recognition to skilled workers whose contribution is usually visible only in the quality of the surface itself.
Training, qualifications and professional standing
Education runs through the Pitchcare offer, and the magazine supports it editorially. Pitchcare delivered training courses, including an artificial sports surfaces maintenance course independently accredited by Lantra, designed to provide basic knowledge of the different artificial surface types, from tufted and sand-dressed to long-pile 3G and water-based surfaces. Coverage of training, turf science events and qualifications sits naturally in the magazine: its pages have reported gatherings such as Turf Science Live at Leicester City's training ground, where more than a hundred turf professionals worked through research stations on nutrition, pest management and the journey from laboratory findings to real-world results. By treating groundsmanship as a scientific, qualified profession rather than a purely manual trade, both the courses and the journalism press the same argument, that the people who manage sports surfaces deserve professional status, professional pay structures and professional media.
News, jobs and community services
Around the magazine, the Pitchcare platform provides the daily infrastructure of the profession. The website carries top industry news, from appointments in bodies such as The R&A's sustainable agronomy service to debates about turf degrees and industry conferences, plus pests and diseases guidance timed to the season. Its jobs board advertises roles from groundsperson and grounds apprentice posts at schools to groundskeeper positions at golf clubs and senior roles at polo clubs and private members' clubs, making it a labour market as well as a publication. The magazine, described as the industry's leading title and the respected platform for news, advice, experience and knowledge, anchors this ecosystem. A grounds professional may arrive for a bag of seed or a job listing and stay for the features, which is precisely the one-stop-shop model Pitchcare says it aims to provide for turfcare professionals, lawncare enthusiasts and groundskeepers nationwide.
Grassroots as well as the Premier League
A consistent strength of Pitchcare's journalism is its refusal to cover only elite sport. Its product ranges are sold, in its own phrase, for everything from Premier League and championship golf greens to grassroots pitches, and the editorial follows the same spread. The magazine and website have told the story of a Shropshire rugby club whose waterlogged pitch cancelled fixtures and cost revenue, until grants, drainage work by thirty volunteers and advice from the Rugby Football Union's head groundsman produced what the club believed was the best first-team pitch in the county, helping the side to repeated promotions. Stories like that speak to the thousands of volunteer and part-time groundsmen who maintain community sport with small budgets. They also demonstrate the magazine's practical method: identify the problem, find the expertise, describe the programme of work and report the measurable result.
Artificial surfaces, sustainability and a changing climate
The modern turf professional's agenda extends well beyond grass seed, and the magazine reflects that. Artificial surfaces, once a side topic, now occupy substantial coverage, from maintenance courses to product development, as schools, councils and clubs choose synthetic pitches for durability. Environmental questions recur: environmentally friendly outfield nutrition, integrated turf pest management, beneficial nematodes against leatherjackets and chafer grubs, and sustainable agronomy all feature in the platform's recent content. Weather is the industry's constant variable, and flooding, drought and disease pressure shape both the news and the technical advice the magazine publishes. For a readership whose work is performed outdoors and judged in public every weekend, coverage that links research, product innovation and day-to-day practice is the magazine's core value.
Place in British turfcare
Pitchcare Magazine's significance lies in the position Pitchcare built for itself: a publisher, retailer, trainer and community for the turf profession, created from a groundsman's website and grown, within two decades, from four staff to more than a hundred before its sale to Agrovista as part of Maxwell Amenity. The magazine, reaching Issue 128 in its downloadable listing, remains its editorial flagship, carrying the interviews, diaries, technical features and venue stories that give the profession a literature of its own. In a field where expertise was once local and oral, Pitchcare made it national and written, and its magazine is the most tangible product of that change: a title in which the head groundsman of a famous venue and the volunteer at a village rugby club can read, and be read by, each other.
