An artificial grass sports pitch successfully resurfaced by Thornton Sports has received the necessary accreditation to allow competition level hockey to be played on it.

The surface chosen for Driffield Leisure Centre’s new pitch was Thornton Sports’ in-house UK manufactured ‘Premier 10 National’ sand-dressed surface.

The new pitch was examined by an independent test house and successfully passed FIH (International Hockey Federation) National accreditation.

A new shock-pad layer was also installed as part of the project when initial inspections confirmed that the existing shock-pad was unsuitable and unlikely to match the lifespan of the new synthetic grass.

Thornton Sports was able to reuse the previous artificial grass sports surface in a number of ways, including surfacing the facility’s spectator area and offering some of it free of charge to local agricultural businesses. Additionally, off-cuts of the new surface were installed onto the facility’s hockey goals as a noise pollution reduction technique.