The Water Conversation Clubs Need to Have ASAP

The La Niña that soaked Queensland through 2025 is finished. The Bureau of Meteorology's ACCESS-S model has every one of its 99 outcomes reaching El Niño thresholds by around July. Model peaks push into territory that matches the 1997-98 and 2015-16 events, which are the strongest in the record.

The Indian Ocean Dipole is currently neutral but trending positive over winter and spring. Positive IOD alongside an El Niño is the historically driest combination for eastern Australia.

The last time both coincided was 2019, and the Black Summer followed.

BOM meteorologist Tom walks through the ACCESS-S ensemble and what past El Niño years have meant for eastern Australia's winter and spring rainfall.

The BOM's long-range outlooks show 80% probability of below-average rainfall across eastern Australia for May through July, with the greatest ENSO-driven rainfall reduction running late autumn through mid-spring.

In past El Niño winters, the national winter rain average falls by about 32%. Spring falls by about 20%. The wet season itself is not affected, so summer storms will still come. It's the six months between that carry the risk.

This is not a forecast to panic about. But we must think about both this winter's upcoming dryness and also the longer term water management of clubs.

What it means for courts

Queensland croquet courts are almost all Santa Ana couch or a close bermudagrass cousin. Couch is the most drought-tolerant warm-season turf used on Australian sports grounds. Tolerant doesn't mean immune. Active couch needs around 25mm of water a week to stay playable. Below that, the plant switches from growing leaf to protecting roots, and visible stress appears inside 10 to 14 days. Sandy coastal profiles show it sooner.

The surface firms, hoop holes stop healing cleanly, and on hydrophobic soils water starts running off rather than soaking in.

At around seven weeks without water, couch enters dormancy. It can survive a further three or four weeks in that state. Past roughly eleven weeks, you're looking at turf loss, not turf stress.

Once rain comes back, recovery takes another three to four weeks. A court that loses its surface in July doesn't come back in July if it rains. It comes back in September.

The three questions

Here are three helpful questions to ask now so the future will thank you.

1. Does your club have a specific water policy?

It's ok to say no, most clubs don't. That's the first step, to realise that it's an important part of playing croquet. The grass. And the water that keeps it alive.

A water policy sounds more scary than it is. It is simply thinking now about what to do in a drought or if water restrictions occur, before it happens. And writing it down.

The practical step is to contact your water authority now and confirm your status. Urban Utilities covers Brisbane, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Scenic Rim. Unitywater covers Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast. Most SEQ restriction schedules give sports grounds either exemptions or separate watering windows outside residential rules.

Retroactive exemption applications during an active restriction are harder.

Ring them before June, ask what class of user your club is treated as, and store the answer so future committees know. Ask about concessions or exemptions that might be available now, get in before everyone else.

2. If the club needed to spend more money on water, could it? And how much is it willing to spend?

Two questions, really. The first is about capacity. If the bill doubled next year is the money there? Try to avoid cuts to maintenance, otherwise one problem leads to many others.

The second is about setting a number now, before any pressure is on. What amount is the committee prepared to authorise on water-related spending over the next twelve months? Decide it in a calm meeting, minute it, then begin discussions from there when it needs consideration again.

It's a starting point, not a number for life. It can be changed. Its purpose is to take pressure off the committee about the decision because thinking about it has already begun.

The figure doesn't need to be large. A small club might set $2,000 aside for the upcoming increase in water costs. A larger club might commit $15,000 to $20,000 for tank storage or the first phase of bore feasibility. What matters is that your club has thought about it.

Grants (council, state sport and rec, Gambling Community Benefit Fund) take months and aren't guaranteed. So if your club sees a gap in your water cycle that a grant could help with, decide the project and begin talking about it.

3. How dry do your courts get with no rain?

This one requires memory.

Talk to whoever has been at the club longest. How did the courts look at the end of the last bad dry spell? Did they recover on their own when the rain came back, or did the club have to do remedial work?

Knowing your lawn's history tells you how much lead time you have before damage becomes visible. It has been quite a while since our last drought, so it could be worth asking.

What can you do?

A handful of levers worth knowing about. None of them solve the problem on their own, and most clubs end up combining two or three.

Rainwater tanks. Under the Queensland Plumbing and Wastewater Code, installing a tank for outdoor irrigation only (not plumbed indoors) requires no permit. QDC MP 4.2 only applies to new buildings in participating councils, so existing club facilities are not captured. A 22,500L Bushmans poly tank costs around $2,955 to $3,250 and gives a three-court facility about eleven days of bridge at full dry-season consumption of roughly 20kL a week. To cover a four-week dry spell between rain events, clubs need around 56,000L of storage. Stacking tanks or combining tank and bore is the usual approach.

Bore water. Under the Water Act 2000 any bore deeper than 6 metres must be drilled by a licensed driller on the Queensland Register. In SEQ's declared groundwater management areas (Lockyer Valley, Warrill Bremer Alluvial, Cressbrook Creek Alluvial, Watercourse Buffer Zone, and Cooloola Sandmass), extraction requires a licence. We couldn't find a confirmed not-for-profit exemption for sporting clubs in web-available material. Ring DRDMW on 13 74 68 (13 QGOV) before committing to anything. Drilling for a 20-40m bore in SEQ runs $5,000 to $10,000. A pump adds another $1,500 to $4,000. A water quality test ($200 to $600) should come first. Coastal groundwater salinity is a documented risk: Redland City Council spent around $500,000 establishing seashore paspalum after standard grasses failed repeatedly on saline groundwater. A $400 test avoids a five-figure mistake. The BOM Australian Groundwater Explorer (bom.gov.au/water/groundwater/explorer) maps historic salinity and water-level data from nearby bores and takes fifteen minutes.

Drainage capture and recycling. If the courts are graded to a drain, the water isn't gone when it leaves the surface. A closed-loop setup catches drainage and sprinkler runoff into a tank and cycles it back through the irrigation system. Retrofitting one depends entirely on existing drainage layout and whether there's a low point to put a collection tank. Worth a conversation with a sports-turf contractor before assuming it isn't possible.

Automatic irrigation. Clubs still watering on a fixed timer, or by manual sprinkler, are almost always using more water than the courts actually need. An automatic system that reads weather data or soil moisture and waters only when the courts are dry can cut 15 to 50% off consumption. It doesn't create new water. But it can use it smarter.

Wetting agents. Not a new water source, but a force-multiplier on sandy coastal profiles (Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, bayside Brisbane). Apply preventively at the start of the dry season to stop the rootzone going hydrophobic. Details on products and timing will be in the upcoming lawn-care wiki.

Think now to lessen trouble later

Some clubs already have tanks, bores, recycled systems, and written policies in place. Others are still on mains water and rainfall alone.

The reason we're writing this in April, not August, is that the dry season won't bite until spring. So thinking about it now allows time to know where the club sits before anything has begun happening.

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Join the conversation on Club Hub

We've opened a thread for clubs to share how they're thinking about water, policy, and the dry season ahead.

The coming dry — what's your club's water plan? →

More committee guides and tools: clubhub.croquetqld.org