Matt Keough – 2009 Scotts Australia Greenkeeper of the Year Award

Matt Keough
Albion Park Bowling Club

The NSW Bowling Greenkeepers Association congratulates Matt Keough on being awarded the Greenkeeper of the Year 2009.

Matt received his award at the Legends Day recently held at Valentine Bowling Club in July. Matt received the award for his great work at Albion Park Bowling Club, however he has recently re-located to Engadine Bowling Club for another new challenge in his greenkeeping career.

Matt’s nomination highlighted his skills and experience and a summary of his career to date is outlined below.

Matt gained employment at Junee Bowling Club in late 1994, he was still finishing his HSC. They let him complete the certificate, but he did help renovate a green before starting exams during his last school holidays.

Matt’s first job was behind a scarifier then straight onto an old multicore. His boss was Kevin ‘Mick’ Gillard, the long serving Secretary/Treasurer of Wagga and District Greenkeepers Association.

He then left Junee in 1998 and moved to Sydney were he worked at Ramsgate RSL as a permanent in the Bar. While there Matt did a couple of top dresses and holidays for Johnny Waters. He stayed employed there for 9 months, just long enough to meet a beautiful bar attendant named Fiona.

He turned down a job at East Lakes Golf Club to take the job as head greenkeeper at Coogee Bowling Club, this put him in contact with an excellent network of greenkeepers that helped him really develop in the trade. The many top-dresses, and Friday morning breakfasts at Café Congo were a great source of knowledge, and piss taking. As the standard txt message use to say ‘be there or be talked about’.

At Coogee he built the first crown bowls green in Australia, a massive flop, but a very different experience. Matt wasn’t sure if turning the green into a crown or back again was the most difficult. The initial ‘crown’ was hand screeded by a team of concreters, it was designed from vague standards that had a flat top in the middle of the green and increasingly dropped away every 3m to be 18″ lower in the corners. When re-levelled the base laser was botched and the first laser after grassing took over 20 tons of soil and in some areas had 2″ of soil on it. In total the renovation took 60 tons of topdressing in the first year.

He was then employed by Albion Park Bowling Club in July 2005, this as it has turned out was Matt’s best career move. One of the larger bowling clubs in the state, he went from a club of just on 100 bowlers to a club of over 350.

During Matt’s time at Albion Park he has installed a rain water harvesting system for use on the greens and toilets, sunk a bore which has 6500ppm of salt, then found a system to allow us to use this water, constructed a wash down bay and chemical storage mix area, and regrassed a green with tiff dwarf.

Matt has always enjoyed great support from all the boards he has dealt with but Albion Park were driven and ambitious. They wanted to be known as a good, strong bowling club. In return, Matt gave them as good a green surface as possible.