Tag Archive for: emotional

Emotional BTME celebration

Emotional BTME celebration: A turf educator known as the ‘grandfather of greenkeeper education’ and credited with helping establish training opportunities for those working on golf courses was recognised on the opening evening of the BIGGA Turf Management Exhibition (BTME).

At the BIGGA Welcome Celebration with AMS Robotics, Dennis Mortram, 75, was awarded with the Outstanding Contribution of the Year Award sponsored by Bernhard and Company. Dennis is a former tutor at Reaseheath College in Cheshire and was one of the first to recognise that greenkeepers would require industry-specific education if they were to elevate the profession and raise standards of golf course maintenance. He also played a key role in the establishment of the Master Greenkeeper certification.

Emotional BTME celebration

Emotional BTME celebration

A tribute video is available to view here.

BTME is the UK’s leading exhibition for those in the golf greenkeeping and sports turf industries and is taking place in March for the first time in the trade show’s 33-year history. The traditional curtain-raiser of the exhibition is the BIGGA Welcome Celebration sponsored by AMS Robotics and hosted by television presenter Naga Munchetty.

At the event a number of other awards were handed out to BIGGA members who have done extraordinary things throughout their careers or shown wonderful commitment to supporting the association and its members.

The team at Loch Lomond Golf Club was awarded the Greenkeeping Project of the Year Award sponsored by Baroness. With almost 2 metres of rainfall each year, Loch Lomond is a challenging place to build a golf course. David Cole MG and his team have overseen a project that has been described as the largest golf course construction in UK golfing history. Using innovative techniques that included placing a sand cap across the entire course, the team rebuilt the entire golf course over a period of four winters. More information is available here.

The Championship Greenkeeping Performance of the Year Award sponsored by Origin Amenity Solutions was won by the team at Clevedon Golf Club following the hosting the Wright-Morgan Championship on the EuroPro Tour in 2021. The event was only Clevedon’s third professional event in its 130-year history but despite their relative inexperience and a modest operating budget, Course Manager Richard Ponsford and the team produced a golf course that was described by the EuroPro’s tournament director as by far the best presented venue of the year. More information is available here.

Also recognised at the BIGGA Welcome Celebration sponsored by AMS Robotics were:

  • The winners of the Excellence in Communications Awards with Campey Turfcare Systems were revealed to be John Rowbottom of Woolley Park Golf Club (New Media), John Milne of Garmouth & Kingston Golf Club (Outreach) and Shaun Cunningham of Prestonfield Golf Club (Innovation and Thought Leadership).
  • Stuart Taylor, formerly course manager at Glasgow Golf Club, received Life Membership of BIGGA.
  • The Amenity Forum Sprayer Operator of the Year Award was given to Jason Garlick of JMG Amenity.
  • BIGGA’s latest Master Greenkeepers received their certificates. They were Matthew Aplin, Alan FitzGerald, Greg Fitzmaurice, Richard Johnstone and Paul Brett.
  • The audience watched a conversation with Bryn Roberts, deputy head greenkeeper at Padeswood & Buckley, who recently returned from delivering aid to the Ukrainian border.
  • Jonathan Wood of St Andrews Links and winner of the 2021 BIGGA Photographic Competition collected his prizes including a frame print of his winning image.

Dennis Mortram said: “I’m emotionally drained. What we did back then was as a team and I have so many people to thank, who are as deserving as me to be up on this stage. Thank you to everyone for this honour, it is amazing.”

David Cole MG, course manager at Loch Lomond Golf Club, said: “I must admit that I feel like the four years of the project have taken their toll on me so I got quite emotional when Naga announced us as the winners. I’m so proud of the team and I really wanted them to get recognition for what they achieved. I will be indebted to my team until the day I die because they were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week for four years in a row.”

Richard Ponsford, course manager at Clevedon Golf Club, said: “I couldn’t believe it. Ganton and West Lancs are amazing venues and I thought we were just there to make the numbers up. From the team that I have every day at Clevedon to the volunteers, we couldn’t have done it without any of them. For the players to say that the course is up there with the best is something special.”

BTME 2022 continues until Thursday 24 March 2022 at the Harrogate Convention Centre. Registration is free and available at www.btme.org.uk

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Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing: Mental Health Awareness Week, organised by the Mental Health Foundation, runs each year from the 10th to 16th of May. This year’s theme of ‘Nature’ is particularly poignant with lockdown restrictions easing and people once again allowed to socialise at both indoor and outdoor locations.

The emotional wellbeing benefits of nature have been researched extensively over the years and, as Paul Bean from grounds maintenance specialist Nurture Landscapes Group explains, it is important to keep these in mind all-year-round, especially as the world looks to recover from Covid-19.

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Research[1] commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation and the UK World Wildlife Fund (WWF-UK) published ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week found that 62% of people felt that taking a walk helped improve their mental wellbeing during the pandemic.

Now that we are starting to look ahead to the post-Covid world, outside spaces will continue to be areas of comfort. That, of course, means caring for these areas so that they can provide the respite people are looking for.

‘Caring’, in this context, includes small individual actions that each person can take in their day-to-day lives, such as taking litter home, to carrying out more extensive grounds maintenance and improving sustainability practices, such as using energy-efficient equipment when tending to a park’s upkeep.

There is also a lot to be said for creating a space that the local community feel proud to have on their doorstep, achieved by hosting events around biodiversity and environmental awareness.

Urbanised areas in particular can see the benefits of opening up more natural spaces in these ways, especially as the various lockdown measures highlighted the need for improved access. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, only 13% of residents across urban areas in England and the three most populous cities in Wales lived within a ten minute walk of a local park, and of those who did have good access, nearly a quarter (24%) suggested the park was at risk of becoming too overcrowded.[2] Yet before the first lockdown in March 2020, 93% of respondents had visited a green space in the year leading up to movement restrictions being implemented.

Improving natural areas to create a quiet haven in an otherwise stressful and at times, overwhelming setting, doesn’t happen overnight. However, choosing the right plants, flowers, and even the positioning of benches, are good first steps. Then, of course, there is the ongoing TLC which keeps the park looking at its best.

The message of taking care of the natural environment for our own emotional wellbeing is a key one for Mental Health Awareness Week this year, and something we at Nurture Landscapes take great pride in being able to facilitate. While we may not be experts in mental health, we do understand and appreciate how important it is for people to have a space where they can take some time to care for themselves.

And the signs that this will continue to be the case are there already, with offices looking to utilise outdoor meeting areas, such as the one we use ourselves at our head office in Surrey (pictured), and nature charities reporting greater interest in their respective activities, according to ONS data.[3]

The same data reveals that during the summer of 2020, the use of #m_2362510770876043122__ftn3outdoor spaces surged when compared to Natural England’s baseline figures from the period 2010 to 2018, peaking at a 100% increase in August of last year. Good weather and the temporary lifting of restrictions will certainly have been key factors for this dramatic increase, but the understanding and awareness of nature that people developed in the months spent in lockdown will have also contributed.

Before the virus outbreak, when long commutes and crowded urban areas were considered ‘the norm’, going for a walk to clear the mind or get some fresh air out of a busy office provided a welcome respite from the constant pressures of modern living. Covid-19 showed us just how important those five minutes out in the fresh air truly are.

As Mental Health Foundation’s Thriving in Nature report states, “nature is for everyone [and] it is essential that everyone can access nature whatever their circumstances”.[4] To fulfil this vision, and ensure that the post-pandemic era has a strong focus on taking care of our own individual mental health needs, opening up natural spaces and maintaining them to create green oases in what can be an overwhelming world needs to be a priority, especially with nearly half of people in the UK noticing the increasing benefits of nature on their overall mental wellbeing.

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