Stoke City FC Save Hundreds Of Man Hours Marking Out Their Training Pitches With Robot – The Tiny Sport

It’s been nine months since Stoke City FC took delivery of their GPS guided robot line marker from Origin Amenity Solutions, the Tiny Sport.

Andy Jackson, Grounds Manager for the football club says, “we are more than happy. It has been a fantastic buy for the club.”

Andy who has been at Stoke City FC for the last 27 years manages a team of 12 grounds staff who are trained to use the Tiny Sport. He adds, “using the robot is so easy, it makes life so much simpler and helps us manage the business much easier and more efficiently.”

The club has nine grass training pitches, “before the robot we used a spray line marker and it took two people half a day to initial mark each pitch, the Tiny Sport does the same job in 20 minutes. This is a massive saving in time and resources which enables us to get more jobs complete at the same time. In the summer we will be overmarking the pitches two or three times a week, the labour savings we are making, to deploy elsewhere, are just incredible.”

TinyMobileRobots is marketed and distributed exclusively in the UK by Origin Amenity Solutions which brings together four leading industry names – Headland Amenity, Rigby Taylor, TurfKeeper.com and Symbio.

Packed with a range of innovative features, the Tiny Sport is a GPS guided robot designed to make line marking projects as reliable, streamlined, and effortless as possible. Its low weight enables it to be lifted easily by one person, its small size means it can fit into a regular sized car and be transported from one location to another easily.

Andy adds, “It is important for the club to stay at the forefront of technology. Robots for line marking is definitely visionary and the way forward. It really isn’t going to take very long for the robot to pay for itself.

“What I really like about the robot is the flexibility it offers; it does so many things. For example if one of our training coaches wanted training grids, we can produce that really quickly and easily – it’s just no problem at all.” The football club also use the Impact paint supplied by Origin Amenity Solutions, “I’m really happy with the paint. It works perfectly with the robot. It produces nice bright white lines and doesn’t transfer to the grass via the wheels and rollers from machinery. I am very impressed.” Andy continues, “Swapping to Impact paint is also saving us a significant amount of money. We used to use around seven litres of paint to mark a pitch but switching to the Impact paint and with the constant speed of the robot has reduced this to around four litres. At the height of summer we overmark all our training pitches a total of around 20 times a week. For one week alone this saves us in the region of 40 litres of paint. That’s a lot of paint and a lot of money over the course of a year!”

The Origin Amenity Solutions team offer onsite training, maintenance, and general advice. Andy concludes “The communication, support, and advice I have received from Glen Howard at Origin Amenity Solutions has been excellent. I wasn’t convinced by robotic line marking in the past but I’m glad I had a demo from Glen – it's revolutionised the way we carry out our pitch marking.”

Free demonstrations are being offered across the UK. To book or enquire visit https://tinymobilerobots.com/tinymobilerobots-uk/