Neil Stubley said the heatwave has been ‘unprecedented’. (Image: Adam Gerrard / Daily Express)
After 30 championships, the man in charge of Wimbledon’s hallowed turfs has seen all that Britain’s weather can throw at it. “Nothing’s ever the same,” Neil Stubley said as he proudly looked over the pristine Centre Court surface.
And that couldn’t be more the case this year. Temperatures could reach a sweltering 39C — a new UK record for June — in London on Thursday, just days before the world’s greatest tennis players begin their bid for glory in SW19. Neil said the heatwave is “unprecedented,” but revealed he and his crack team of experts have some tricks up their sleeves to keep the courts in tip-top shape.
Neil Stubley and his team are making their final preparations for Wimbledon 2026 (Image: Adam Gerrard / Daily Express)
The 57-year-old said the grass is being watered twice as much as usual, while precautions are being made for Centre Court and Court One when temperatures peak.
The plan is to close the roofs over the two main courts and turn on the air conditioning, bringing them down to a much cooler 25C.
“And then everybody will be coming into the bowl because everybody will be trying to get out of the sun!” Neil quipped.
Reigning Wimbledon men’s singles champion Jannik Sinner on Centre Court last year (Image: Getty)
Despite the blistering temperatures, Neil said he is “quite relaxed” and that he’d prefer to have the heatwave now than later on in the tournament.
“I guess the only thing that is in the back of our mind, certainly in the south-east, is that if you have sustained heat like this, it tends to trigger thunderstorms,” he added, as seen across southern England on Tuesday night.
“So then you have to worry about sort of deluges of rain and making sure that we have to cover the courts, because we need to control how much moisture or water goes on.
“But again, nice challenges to have.”
Neil’s preparation for Wimbledon begins months in advance, with all courts renovated in August and September of each year.
The courts are 100% rye grass — chosen for its durability — and six ton of seed is used annually.
Getting Wimbledon ready is a year-round effort, and the work does not stop once the tennis begins.
The roof is to be closed over Centre Court in the coming days amid high temperatures (Image: Getty)
Over the 14 days of action, the health of the grass courts is checked nearly 6,100 times.
The baselines are checked for live grass/wear some 31,200 times, while the correct ball bounce height is inspected on more than 1,800 occasions.
Carrying out the meticulous work is Neil’s 18 full-time team, complemented by a further 13 who work during the championships and through the grass court season.
Neil said: “We’ve got people from Canada. We’ve got some from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, from different sports.
“We can kind of teach them the nuances of what we do here at the championships and at the same time, we can pick their brains on different sports and see what sort of things they do.
“Every day is a kind of school day when you’re learning, not only from other people, but having to do things ourselves with the weather and everything else.”
Neil and his team will be all hands to the pump throughout the championships.
Every day, each court — 18 championship and 20 practice — are re-lined, rolled and mown.
Aerial view over Wimbledon (Image: Getty)
Each court has its own unique irrigation system and Neil said the technology supporting that is “getting better”, giving ground staff the ability to better target certain areas of the grass.
He said: “Each court has six heads, each head can be individually programmed and our irrigation engineers on their iPads can come in here and just select any particular head and then we do it in seconds.
“So we know that with the bar pressure that we’ve got, and the size of the nozzle and the irrigation heads, we know exactly how many litres of water we can put on and then that correlates to the hardness of the courts.”
Play on the outside courts can continue until 9:30pm during Wimbledon, while play on Centre Court and Court One can finish as late as 11pm which poses its own challenges for Neil and his team.
“We’re quite restricted by the time play finishes to when prep work starts in the morning, we’ve only got a small window for irrigation,” he explained.
“Whatever we put down, we’ve got to guarantee it to be dry the following day.
“Whereas at the moment, as the temperature starts to drop about 6/7pm, we can start putting water on, knowing that the extra two to three hours just helps the evaporation.”
But if there is something Neil’s decades of experience have taught him, it is to expect the unexpected.
“This will be my 31st championship, and I’ve had so far 30 different championships because nothing is ever the same,” he said.
“This weather this week is unprecedented; we’re going into a red heat zone, which we’ve never had before.
“A lot of it we just manage as we go because if you’ve not experienced it before, then we don’t know what to preempt and what to do.”
Tennis fans can be assured that whatever Mother Nature has to offer — rain, sun, thunderstorms or even record-breaking heatwaves — Wimbledon is in safe hands with Neil and his team.