How 1776 United FC Took the Stress Out of Pitch Prep
F youth football club based in Wallingford,
PITCH & LINE MARKERS
“ Give Me Three Minutes”
How 1776 United FC Took the Stress Out of Pitch Prep
or 1776 United FC, a
F youth football club based in Wallingford,
Pennsylvania, pitch marking used to be a weekly logistical headache. But with the introduction of a TinyMobileRobot Pro X from TinyMobileRobots, everything changed quite rapidly.
method of setting out the fields each week changed.” Before that, marking pitches for weekly matches and tournaments was a manual, time-consuming grind. Now, with a few taps on a tablet, Griggs can assign pitch sizes, orientations, and locations- all while soaking up the morning sun. that we were going to use. I get a call from our guy who’ s checking it, saying it feels unplayable. It’ s not safe. I said,‘ What size is it?’ He said,‘ Seven v seven.’ And I said,‘ Give me three minutes.’ Within twenty minutes of that phone call, we had the field lined, goals out, ready to go.”
Sam Griggs, Executive Director of the club, recalls the turning point:“ Once we got the TinyMobileRobot, the whole
This isn’ t just about convenience; the robot has made a major difference in operational efficiency.“ Each year, the cost of the robot is about fifty per cent of what we were paying in labour. Plus, we had some paint savings by cutting the cost of lining our fields in half... it wasn’ t a hard sell at the board meeting.”
The club runs a one-day tournament that uses up to twenty pitches across multiple sites. The real test came when a planned school field was deemed unsafe the day before the event.“ We had a school district field
But it’ s not just about crisis management. The ability to quickly adapt pitch sizes based on sign-ups has also added flexibility for youth matches, enabling younger players to compete on premier surfaces. And the aesthetic benefits? Griggs shares that the fields look clean, precise, and even personalised- the club’ s name is added to the turf for big matches.
For clubs juggling limited staff and rising expectations, 1776 United shows how a linemarking robot isn’ t a luxury- it’ s an essential upgrade.
48 GroundskeepingJournal. co. uk | July / August 2025