Paul O’Grady

When I learned just over a month ago that Geoff Webb, CEO of the Grounds Management Association (GMA) since 2005, announced his intention to step down from his role next year, I felt the ripple through the industry.

In the few days that followed, I saw a multitude of friendly messages and well-wishes to a man who has done so much for the industry.

I was thrilled when Geoff agreed to speak with me last week as I was keen to pick his brains on a variety of topics, such as his initial journey to the GMA, the successes/challenges during his tenure, the changing face of technology in groundscare, the importance of SALTEX, what he’ll miss about the role and his thoughts on the future of the industry.

Paul: Geoff, thank you very much for your time and for speaking with me on behalf of The Landscaper. First of all, congratulations on a wonderful career so far. If you don’t mind, I’d like to start by taking you all the way back to 1987 to the place where your journey began as it were, coming out of school and getting a place at Sheffield Hallam. What do you remember of your time there and how did your degree in recreation management set you up for your eventual career?

Geoff Webb: That’s a really interesting question. I’ve got to really think about how long ago that was which is quite frightening!

I was a late developer. I left school at 16. I didn’t have any good qualifications at all. But I’d always loved sport, so I went and got a coaching qualification in tennis before I did my degree, when I worked for a company called Legal and General.

In those days, those sorts of places had fantastic sports facilities, so it was kind of a mini-university feel for me, so I ended up playing all the different sports – football, tennis etc. – and that gave me a passion to do something different. So I went and did A-levels as a mature student, and then that unlocked the degree that you’re talking about, which I graduated from in 1990. It opened doors to me in the area that I wanted to get into, which was originally tennis.

Long story short is, I did end up with that, after a quick appearance managing a health club for a year. But I badgered a guy who I’d done work experience for during the degree, who worked for the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) at the time, to give me a job. So what I did was go down on a train from Sheffield, arrive at reception at the LTA without an appointment, and I asked to see the HR person to give me a three-month placement as a student on a degree course.

I think she felt sorry for me – I looked like an orphan from somewhere! She gave me a cup of tea and she gave me the placement. After that, I created a relationship with them and ended up working on developing tennis facilities for the LTA for 10 years. That really opened up the journey into the job that I’ve got now.

P: I wanted to touch a little bit on your time at the LTA. So, it was a three-month placement that eventually turned into a full-time role?

G: I went there as work experience, effectively doing my placement at the LTA for three months, and I went around all the different departments, learning what the LTA did. But, in particular I liked the fact that they had this facility development team at the time which was building indoor tennis centres across the UK.

I got involved in a very small team, and my job was to go around the country and get these tennis centres built. We ended up doing 53 tennis centres across the UK.

It was a great insight, and it taught me how to deal with boards and high-profile people. Then, from that, I got headhunted to go into football. I ended up making a choice to move from tennis and went to the Football Foundation.

And that’s where I was very lucky again. It was a sort of a facility-based function, developing their facility grant scheme, which still holds today.I basically set up the parameters for that and worked on developing the structures that the Football Foundation operate from through the grant programme.

It was one of those roles where, once I’d established it, I  was looking around for things to do.. So,  I looked at various jobs and what was then the Institute of Groundsmanship (IOG) was advertising for a Chief Executive. I applied,  had four interviews, and then, back in 2005, they madly offered me the job.

P: 21 years says different Geoff! What did you know about the IOG  prior to joining and what attracted you to the role?

G: I honestly didn’t know that much when I went into it. It just appealed to me, considering the background that I had, and it was covering all sport.

Obviously I’d worked in tennis and football prior to this job, but it opened up every facet of sport to me. I started working with cricket, horse racing, both codes of rugby and, to a lesser extent, golf because obviously The British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association (BIGGA) exist, who look after the golf market and the greenkeeping community that sits alongside that.

But it’s just evolved really, and I probably didn’t realise that I’d end up doing the job for as long as I have. I probably had ambitions to do the job and move on but I’ve stuck with it and hopefully taken it from an organisation that didn’t really have much contact with the outside world – especially sports bodies – and given it a connection, a purpose and an identity.

P: Taking a more general view now, and fast-forwarding a bit – What would you say was your biggest success in your time at the GMA?

G: People keep asking me this question. I’m not very good at understanding what success is. I think it’s just an ongoing mission to improve what you inherited and how you develop it.

I would say some of the staff that we’ve had going through the organisation have gone on to have really great careers beyond our organisation. Because I started out with the coaching philosophy, I’ve tried to apply that to business, and I like to see the growth of our people.

It’s all about putting the right people into the right roles and developing from the organisation that we were when I walked into it (which, I think, including me was seven people. Now we’re up to circa 40 people). What you see is that growth and that development. The other bit is working with a good set of chairpeople, and a good involvement and evolution of board members as well.

We’ve done a lot of structural change internally to meet the demands of a modern-day association. There’s general satisfaction in that, I think. We’ve progressed forward in terms of identity, in terms of raising profile generally for the sector we represent.

But there’s always more work to do. So, I tend to look at what we haven’t done, rather than what we have done and how we can do that better.

As everybody knows, there are ongoing issues with getting fair rates of pay and proper working conditions from people out there working day in, day out and that’s the permanent battle that I think our sector has – as does horticulture in general. All these different professions be it landscaping, horticulture or sports turf management, we’re all pushing for better working conditions for the individuals in them and progression.

P: Technology has obviously really boomed in the time that you’ve been at the helm. I mean, back in 2005, it was very different then. How would you say that the role of the modern grounds manager has changed during that time?

G: I think, personally, we’ve run in parallel to the growth of TV coverage of sport. So just take the Premier League and the power of that. Because it is so global and it’s played out now on a TV platform with billions of people watching it, I think the investment into the sector and the shop window that gives sport in general, with backing from the TV companies – like Sky, for example, with them being the pioneers of that – has benefitted the profession.

But at the same time, it’s brought added pressure because it’s put it under the spotlight globally as well. Everybody expects the standards to be high.

One analogy I always give is that, going back to my early days, by the time Wimbledon comes around every year, you used to see a lot of attention put on Centre Court and how beautiful it is, and the preparation that goes into selling that tournament.

Now, you see that across sport at every level. It’s not just Wimbledon Centre Court; it’s Wembley’s pitch, it’s Twickenham’s pitch, it’s Lord’s Cricket Ground, it’s Aintree Racecourse. It’s all of these different places where it’s almost taken for granted now that they will look pristine and professional and be fantastic surfaces to play on.

And I think we’ve also managed to transpose that at the professional end with the advancement of what we’ve done at the community end of sport, which is to turn around the understanding and knowledge that local volunteers, for example, have when it comes to managing their pitches in your local communities.

We’ve done over 15,000 pitch assessments now at community level across cricket, rugby and football, and the transformation you see in those pitches and the way they survive the winter period now is transformational. It’s totally different from what it used to be.

We are working with governing bodies that we never had contact with before to constantly improve and upgrade knowledge, understanding & awareness of what it takes to maintain a playing surface in our sector. I think that’s something we should be really proud of because it’s a great programme, and it’s called the Pitch Advisory Service Programme.

So that’s had a transformational effect on grassroots sport, for example.

P: Moving away from that now, I’d  like to ask about SALTEX, which has been such a massive part of the GMA’s identity throughout your tenure. How important has the exhibition been, not just for the association, but for the industry as a whole?

G: SALTEX is coming up for it’s 80th edition, so I think that tells it’s own story – it’s been around for a long time. It’s a shop window, rather like I explained how Wimbledon is for Tennis if you like. Everyone focuses on Wimbledon, right?

I think it’s probably been a pioneering trade show. I know others exist – BTME came along later than the birth of SALTEX – and there’s obviously other shows, including GroundsFest, that have come up more recently. The market’s changed, and we’ve got to react to that in terms of the offer of SALTEX itself and what we can do with that.

I think that’s an undersold element of the delivery of SALTEX. We regularly have over 40 countries now attending our trade show and I think that’s testament to the innovation that sits behind companies that supply into the industry, and the technology and the innovation that they provide through their equipment or their market knowledge, and how they’ve invested in the development of sports surfaces in general.

You’ve got all the robotics that have been coming in more recently, and innovation in terms of how you, as a grounds manager, adapt to the evolution of technology, for example. I think it gives you all of that, and it’s a meeting place for a lot of people.

You can network, you can see the latest innovations, and I think putting it central in the country has put it on a professional level as well.

There’s always this discussion about outdoor/indoor trade shows, but for us, we’ve got a model that we believe in, and I think we’ve got very good-quality buyers coming to that as well.

So it is established, but you’ve always got to have an eye on the future, and you have to be willing to adapt and look at everything around you, really. That’s where I think, with the structures that we’ve now got in place with our staff group and our board group, we can react to those sort of things.

P: On a more personal note, do you have a favourite moment or a favourite year of the event, or someone that was there that you were particularly pleased about?

G: I think there’s been loads of characters involved over the years. I mean, I’d have to single Derek Walder out – he is just an amazing individual. He did 42 years of trade shows. I can’t think of anybody in the exhibition business who is able to survive 42 years of doing trade shows! His achievements are just legendary – we call him Mr SALTEX.

As a not-for-profit, 100% of the revenue generated by SALTEX is reinvested directly back into the sports turf and grounds care industry. I think, in terms of the reinvestment of the reward we get from SALTEX, that’s something I’m really proud of because we can use that for educational purposes. We can use that for lobbying purposes. There’s a myriad of things that we can achieve.

The stand-out moment? Probably coming back from COVID. There was big pressure on anybody, anywhere, doing an exhibition because everybody was closed down for a long period of time. The buzz we got from the first show back was tremendous, really.

Nobody had dealt with a situation like a pandemic before, so I think that was the landmark moment. Another, probably a bit more controversial one, was  taking it from Windsor to the NEC in Birmingham and the way we did that. We did that within 14 months. Most people were telling me it takes two years to do that sort of thing so I think we did that effectively and well.

Some people will never forgive me for the fact we’re now not outdoors at Windsor, but we did talk to the market about it at the time. We had focus groups on it and all sorts of other things, and it’s been pretty successful where it is now. Loads of different people have contributed to that as well.

So I’d just say thanks to anybody who’s been involved in the journey of SALTEX.

P: Moving away from SALTEX now, and taking another sort of wider view of the industry, ground staff often do hugely important work behind the scenes. For a long time, they weren’t getting a lot of public recognition. Do you think the profile and appreciation of the profession has improved in recent times?

G: I do, I still think you get pockets of activity when you suddenly think, “oh, here we are back at this point again,” and you have to go back and defend your corner.

The most recent case in point was when we issued a statement after Suella Braverman commented that specialist land-management-based degrees were “dud degrees” and used golf as the analogy for that. Again, that comes back to having the structure internally to be able to react to adverse commentary. Previously, we’d seen something – I think it was in Rugby League. There was another example.

There was another one in cricket when – I think it was England and India, in the international test series last year – some adverse comments were made. I think we’re now much better at representing the sector because we’ve got people like Ash Willis (PR and Comms Manager for the GMA) who are really good at helping us form an opinion, get that opinion out, and re-establish that this is an industry not to be messed with.

It has substantial infrastructure behind it, it has substantial industry behind it, it contributes over a billion to the economy and we have built up a database of research as well. So when these incidents do occur, we can use those statistics. We’ve got the facts that we can argue against a negative opinion and I think we’ve done that much more successfully.

Added to that is the fact that we didn’t really introduce the GMA Awards until the last 15 years. The awards themselves generate interest. Sometimes they’re controversial because, when somebody doesn’t win, they might be a bit upset that they didn’t win. I think we’ve got over 175  award winners over the years now. That, in itself, covers an entirety of inputs into different facets of the sports turf industry.

So it covers volunteer and community level all the way through to elite-level sport. Across that range, it gives you a brilliant set of case studies to work from, go out there with and re-promote. We back that up with #GroundsWeek, which is an initiative designed to raise the profile beyond the industry itself, and people have really bought into that.

We work tirelessly to address all these sorts of things through initiatives like, for example, the NextGen group that we’ve got (a group of young professionals representing the GMA, committed to inspiring the next generation to join the grounds management industry), we’ve got the Schools Into Stadia programme, designed to inspire a younger generation of groundspeople. There’s always more to be done, but we’re seeing positive green shoots from all of this investment.

One of the things we do know from the research is that participation in the industry among under-35s, has increased quite steadily in recent years. It’s risen from around probably 19% in 2022 to over 30% in 2024 – empirical evidence that backs that up.

Also, when you look at diversity in the sector and trying to plug that employment gap, we have done a lot of work more recently around encouraging more women and girls to consider a career in the sector. We’re looking at the school level as well as adult level and we know that that’s gone up from around 4% in 2023 to 10% now.

Again, there are some green shoots there, and I think things like last year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup final, when the pitch was prepared by an all-female grounds team just reinforces the fact that we’ve got to be open to the widest demographic in order to promote an industry that’s fit for the future.

P: Fantastic. We’ve touched on it already, but the industry obviously has had to face significant challenges, whether that be climate pressures, changing participation or legislation. I just wondered what you perceived to be the biggest challenge during your time at the GMA?

G: I think there are better examples now of understanding what is a fair rate of pay and expectation on grounds teams to work to. But I think some of the challenges – if you look right now at what has just happened to the independent school sector, with the charitable status taken away from them – do add pressure back to that group of people, depending on the outlook of the schools themselves and maybe the bursars, or the people who control the pounds, shillings and pence in those sort of situations.

The key is going and talking to those decision-makers and encouraging them to see it differently. That’s where we do quite a lot of effective lobbying behind the scenes. It’s not a promotional thing – it’s getting into these institutes and places where you can see bad practice and try to re-educate.

One of the things that’s helping to do that is the Grounds Management Framework, because it gives an ability to put a structure to this industry. You can measure, not only the quality of the surface and where you should be according to the facility you’re operating, but also what we should be doing in terms of number of people you employ on that particular site, their skills base, their training and their development.

And that’s where, again, the GMA quite often will get it right. The industry will talk about trade shows all the time, but actually what we do year in, year out is educate a lot of people. I mean we did over 2,000 delegates this year – that’s pretty much average for us.

We’ve got people being trained annually all the time and trying to provide clear standards and define career pathways across the sector.

And we work with the Trailblazer Group for example, on the apprenticeship framework. We work with IfATE, and we’re sort of now more of a checker and challenger of what the content of those apprenticeships look like.

We’ve seen real progress on the offerings that are now available just through an apprenticeship framework itself. There’s now a level five sports turf apprenticeship, which is great news. It’s continually moving forward and I think some people see it as static.

I don’t see it that way.

I think we are nudging ever forward, but you continually have to battle with the sector against other sectors who are equally looking for talented people to come into them. We’ve got to be doing everything we can to present this industry as a formidable industry that somebody wants to come and work in.

P: Of course. Coming towards the end now. I just wondered what you would miss most about the role when you eventually step down next year?

G: What will I miss most? Just people. It’s fascinating – I’ve been privileged to see so many different places across so many different sectors: how sport is played in this country, how recreational spaces are offered in this country. And I’m just privileged to be somehow representing that and seeing really good people get the recognition it deserves.

I mean, I think anybody will tell you that you come into this industry and meet people and it’s a really good community. I think it sometimes goes wrongly under the radar for the wrong reasons and I hope that whatever happens going forward, the industry continues to get the profile it deserves.

P: And finally, if you could give one piece of advice to a young person considering a career in grounds management today. What would that be?

G: Go for it.