If you have been to the Steinbach Soccer Park recently, you may have noticed long trenches snaking their way through the park.

Head of Parks and Recreation Russ Dyck says two pitches are closed for maintenance right now. He notes they have hired a contractor to install underground irrigation for a couple of soccer pitches this summer.

Trenches can be seen snaking through the park

"We have five pitches there in total, we only had underground irrigation on one, which we installed a number of years ago and it is definitely more efficient to do it that way rather than have above-ground sprinkler carts and so forth. It is a lot less labour intensive and a lot more efficient in terms of coverage. This year we are doing two more fields and looking to do the other two over the next couple of years."

Dyck says the work that is being done this year will cost somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000.

"Initially when we installed our irrigation on our first field, we did install a well for that and header lines were trenched to each of the fields where we have been hooking up above-ground carts for irrigation but now we are pulling lines across each field for all the sprinkler heads and some additional wiring so that it can be hooked up to our timer system."

With mini soccer done for the season, Dyck says this was a good time to do maintenance. He notes all soccer games are currently being scheduled on the remaining three fields.