Sunshine on Leith: Scott MacCallum pays a visit to Easter Road and Hibernian Football Club to meet Head Groundsman Steven Thomas who has made the job his own.
Here’s the scenario. You attend an interview for the job of your dreams and, having waited all day for the phone to ring, are called and offered the position. What would you do? A. Accept before the caller had finished telling you the good news or B. Ask for 10 minutes to think about it.
Sunshine on Leith
Well, you might have expected Hibs season ticket holder Steven Thomas, pictured above, to be an option A kind of a guy, when he was called on October 31st, 2022, and offered the position of Head Groundsman at Easter Road.
However he went down the option B route and spent the next 10 minutes calling everyone of importance to him to ask their advice.
“I thought I might have blown it!” he recalled, thinking back to the moment. In mitigation you could say that it was a case of making sure that heads ruled hearts in h is decision, but for a dyed-in-the-wool Hibs man, if he’d thought about it, anything involving “Hearts” was always going to be a long shot.
It says much for Steven, however, that, given the importance of the job to him, he didn’t jump straight in and that he took time to weigh up everything before accepting the position.
He’d come from a golf greenkeeping background and prior to his move to Easter Road was Deputy Head Greenkeeper at Prestonfield Golf Club, in Edinburgh.
“Although I had been in golf all my working career, I was more of a football man and I had always said that I wanted to work at Hibs. I was never good enough to play for the team, so the next best thing would be to work for them.”
When the job was advertised on social media he was obviously interested, but was unsure if it was the right time in his career to go for it, hence the hesitation when he got the job offer.
“My partner said, ‘Look, we’ll never know if it is the right time until you try it. If you go for it, we’ll back you all the way.’. So it was very much a family decision to apply,” said Steven.
Sunshine on Leith
It wasn’t just his agronomic knowledge and experience that shone through at interview, it was the passion for the club and the team.
“During the interview I said my ambition was to be producing pitches for Hibs in European competition season after season. At the time Hibs were struggling a little bit but my boss-to-be obviously saw that drive and ambition in me,” said Steven, who is now producing those very European competition pitches.
He actually put some of his ultimate success in getting the job down to a piece of advice he got from one of the former work mates.
“I have always taken advice from people I’ve worked with and one of them suggested that I make up a portfolio of photos of my proudest work to give the interviewer something to look at.
“So I made up a folder of around 20 pictures and it seemed to go down pretty well because he did cast his eye over a few photos and actually asked questions about some of them.”
Having got the job, three weeks later Steven was preparing his very first football pitch for a top class match – Hibs against Livingston in the Scottish Premiership.
“In my first few weeks I probably pushed too hard because I really wanted to make an instant impact, but at the end of November that was never going to happen. I was hell-bent on making a big impression when, in hindsight, I should have maybe eased off a bit.”
The club had been without a groundsman for about three months prior to Steven’s arrival with the essential work being carried out by a contractor.
“It is fair to say that there had been a lack of key maintenance going on in terms of aeration, nutrition and lighting rig deployment,” said Steven, of those tough first few weeks.
Ah, lighting rigs. How did a man, fresh off the golf course, know anything about lighting rigs and how to get the most from them?
“The be all and end all is that I didn’t know anything about lighting rigs,” he admits.
“So I had a week or two where I was on the phone to TLS, who had supplied the rigs, and in particular Mark Sinnett.
“I called everyone I knew who worked with rigs, trying to get as much information as I could – where to put them, how they’re set up, how they work. Basically starting from scratch,” explained Steven, who also picked the brains of Tony Owens and Scott Robinson.
“TLS had also supplied us with a shade analysis for the pitch, including data on where and when sun sets, where the sun goes down, the number of hours these lighting rigs should be on the pitch and where they should be deployed. That was very useful.”
Having got to grips with the intricacies of the job, it would be fair to say that Steven has started to make a real impact.
He sees golf greenkeeping and football groundsmanship as offering very transferable skill, while being different in so many other ways.
“For me it’s the aspect of the environment round about you. Where a golf course is predominantly an open air venue, stadiums are more enclosed.
That said here we have four separate stands with open corners which gives a bit more sunlight and airflow than some other stadia.
Sunshine on Leith
“Like a golf course you’ll still get hot spots and cold spots. I always say you could need a jumper and a jacket against it when it came to game days.
“You’re having to do double cuts and line marking, and I was here on my own. I was spending 15-hour days here, coming in when it was dark, and leaving when it was dark.
“It was a very lonely time, but again, you look at the bigger picture, it was a very crucial time for me in terms of how I was learning,” said Steven, who has since been joined by his Deputy Ronan McKenna.
A match day always exciting.
“For TV cameras up here in Scotland we have to be set up three hours before kick off. For a standard three o’clock Saturday kickoff we have to have the pitch cut, lines marked goals in place and everything ready to go so we’ll come in around 7am.
“What Ronan and I normally do is cut one way together and then once we get halfway through the pitch, I’ll disappear and get the line marking set up and then follow behind Ronan to finish the cutting.”
The rest of the match day squad is made up of volunteers.
“They come in an hour before kick-off and we have a coffee and a catch-up. Once the players go out onto the pitch, we follow them behind them divoting, just to make sure everything’s smooth and running well.
They are super guys, who do it for the love of the club and we couldn’t operate a match without them.
“At half time we go out together as a team. and pitch-fork and divoting.
I’ll make sure the moisture levels are where they need to be. After the game, we spend about an hour divoting,” he explained.
Having seen the pitch on television the Sunday before our chat for a match against Celtic, the pitch looked immaculate, but how does Steven envisage moving things to the next level?
“The pitch is predominantly a fibre sand base with a hybrid stitch, to give us a bit of reinforcement and stability, However, it is over 20 years old and, I would call it, the equivalent of a push up green on a golf course. It’s a push up hybrid pitch. We are also working with an old boiler system, an old irrigation system and an old drainage system,” he revealed.
“So right now we’re at the position where more investment is required to get to the next level,” he explained.
“When I came in here three years ago I would sit down and plan and prepare a case for all expenditure, even produce a spreadsheet detailing why I thought we needed this and how it’s going to benefit the club. That would be for something as small as a hand tool. “For an entire pitch that is obviously a bit of a harder sell. First and foremost the cost, second of all the tight time scale between close of one season and start of the next fto enable us to turn it around – going from renewing everything from soil, drainage, under soil heating, to the grass on the surface.
“The club know what they need to do and where they need to go.”
As a fan, and a former season ticket holder, does it feel weird working alongside players you were once cheering from the stands?
“When I came in, some of these guys were almost my heroes, but now they’re just colleagues and when I see them we chat just the same as regular colleagues and friends do.”
Steven is prolific on social media both for the Hibs support and for the rest of the sports turf sector.
“The supporters love it. They love seeing what goes on behind the scenes on a day-to-day basis. They love seeing how we do things, what we do and what we’re trying to produce for a match day,” said Steven, whose profile saw him invited to talk at the recent TurfTech conference in Switzerland. His work also gets noticed at every level within the club.
“I always remember our CEO pulling me into his office one day for a chat about social media. I immediately went, ‘Oh oh, here we go’ and was at the point where I was about to apologise when he said, ‘I love it. I love what you do. I love how passionate you are about the club and I love the interaction it’s getting from supporters. I love it. Keep it going’,” he said.
With his ability to interact on social media, never mind his agronomic skills and professionalism, Steven is very much a part of the new breed of turf professionals working within the industry.
If that phone call came through to offer him the job tomorrow, I don’t think he’d need the same time to think about accepting. It’s a job which seems to fit him like a glove.
