SportSURF Workshop - Sports Surfaces - Maintaining Performance

The SportSURF workshop will be held on Wednesday 4th March 2009 at Loughborough University’s Sport Technology Institute, Loughborough, UK. The focus of the workshop will be on describing and discussing the technology of ‘Maintaining Performance’ for sport pitches.
This one day event will comprise a focussed seminar describing ‘best practice’ and technical aspects of the maintenance and performance behaviour of synthetic sport surfaces, presenting case studies of current practice and recent research findings, raising issues for discussion and debate. This workshop and the network are supported by SAPCA.



The invited speaker sessions will update, discuss and inform the delegates on current practice and the findings from recent research projects. In addition it is an opportunity to raise questions or bring your experience to the event to help disseminate practice/advice/guidance, and identify areas where knowledge is lacking. It follows on from previous SportSURF workshop seminars wherein maintenance was frequently identified as a topical issue to clients, operators, users and practitioners in general. Understanding the changes that occur and their effects on sport-surface interactions is a key challenge to sport surface science research also.



Who should attend?



The workshop is aimed at the sport surface industry and the wider related community, including: Sport surface Suppliers and Manufacturers; Consultants; Contractors; Architects; Owner/operators; Funders, National Governing Bodies, Researchers, Users, and other parties interested in sport surface science and behaviour.



The SportSURF network is in its fourth year of existence, and currently has approximately 280 members and a further 150 contacts in its community. In the initial 3 year subsidised period it ran or co-hosted twelve events that directly impacted on over 800 attendees, inaugurated a new sport surfaces conference in 2007 and helped catalyse many new research projects.