A playing field at the Hawke's Bay Regional Sports Park is unusable after being torn up by one or more vehicles over the weekend.
Sports Park chief executive Jock Mackintosh said he discovered the damage this morning.
It happened some time over the weekend after Saturday's sports fixtures.
"This field is now ruined until next season.
"Starting from August we will have 1000 people using these fields - now we are going to have to squeeze them all on to six fields rather than seven."
The field, which was used by various sporting codes, from league to rugby, football and touch, had been close to pristine condition, having been prepared over the preceding months.
Now carved up with ruts up to 30mm deep, all that work had gone to waste, Mackintosh said.
"You can't just roll over it as that compacts the ground and then you create another problem with drainage, so we have no option but to close the field while we refill the ruts with soil and resow the ground."
While such vandalism had occurred a couple of times before over the years, this incident was particularly bad with it being winter and the ground soft.
"A lot of the money that funds the Sports Park is money we raise so it's a complete wind-up when this kind of thing happens and we need to pay for fixing it when that money could be spent on other improvements."
League was one code that used the field and Rugby League Hawke's Bay chairman Kevin Tamati said the destruction was "disappointing".
"The idiots that did this had no thought of the problem they were going to cause for everyone else - we have our spring competition starting in August that involves men, women and youth and this is going to be a real inconvenience."
Mackintosh said the ground would need to be fenced off after the repair work was done and he called on anyone who might know who caused the destruction to come forward.
"If anyone knows who did this we'd like them to tell us so that those responsible can help us fix it up."
