The creation of the franchised New Zealand Football Championship in 2004 killed the club as a top-tier participant and led to a refocus on the venue, with the creation of the trust that now oversees Bill McKinlay Park.<\/p>\n
The pitch was upgraded so that in addition to Uni-Mount teams, it could be hired by other users for regular competition and tournaments, primarily for football but now also touch football and ultimate frisbee.<\/p>\n
The fourth-generation turf is branded as Pure PT and installed in New Zealand by TigerTurf, whose Dutch-based parent company, TenCate, developed the product in association with PSV Eindhoven over several years.<\/p>\n
The Bill McKinlay Park pitch cost around $750,000, of which Auckland Council\u2019s Sport and Recreation Facilities Investment Fund contributed $300,000 and the trust around $200,000, with grants from the Four Winds Foundation, Grassroots Trust and New Zealand Community Trust making up the balance. <\/p>\n
Bill McKinlay Park Trust chairman Steve Baggaley said their gen four football pitch doesn\u2019t need a shockpad, which would have cost around $150,000, so the price they paid was about the same as a gen three pitch with a shockpad.<\/p>\n
A recent function at Bill McKinlay Park about gen four pitches was attended by dozens of potential users, including rugby organisations, although a shockpad is needed if a gen four pitch is installed for rugby.<\/p>\n
Baggaley said the roll and bounce of the ball on their pitch were more akin to a grass surface, and that without rubber or chip infill, maintenance requirements were less onerous.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s spongier and is supposed to act more like grass.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrass is the ideal surface but it\u2019s a better version of an artificial pitch. There\u2019s week-to-week maintenance \u2013 keeping it clean, blowing any leaves off it \u2013 but the deep cleaning and regular maintenance needed with an infill pitch isn\u2019t required.<\/p>\n
\u201cNone [of the infill options] are ideal and they all compact down so you end up with a hard turf. Traditionally with an infill pitch, you need to rake them, lift the infill and clean them, whereas with one that doesn\u2019t have infill, you don\u2019t need to do that. You just need to brush it, and rather than brushing monthly, it gets brushed every three months now.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the big issues with the traditional pitches is that the infill rubs together and damages the filaments, so if there\u2019s no infill, there\u2019s no damage to the filaments, so we should get a longer life out of it. I\u2019m happy with it. It means we don\u2019t have to worry about that for 15-20 years and can focus on other areas of the park.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trust\u2019s next major project is installing small-sided pitches on ground between the park and railway line that has been added to their lease. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The creation of the franchised New Zealand Football Championship in 2004 killed the club as a top-tier participant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1975,1888,5213,286017,15978,7240,13620,10048,117,111,139,69,6725,213,165,27300,9616,13797,52,102,2963],"class_list":["post-580581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-at","tag-first","tag-football","tag-fourthgen","tag-installed","tag-lead","tag-leading","tag-mt","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pitch","tag-sports","tag-their","tag-theyre","tag-turf","tag-used","tag-wellington","tag-with","tag-zealands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}