Update to 2023 Maintenance Practices

When I took over as Superintendent 2 years ago, I knew we had an uphill battel to establish turf health and quality that could sustain the maintenance practices required to achieve the desired conditions. I implemented an aggressive 3-year strategy to progressively overcome the challenges the club had experienced the last few years.

As we enter my third year as superintendent, the course has reaped the benefit of those strategies and were ready to turn over another page.

In 2021 we focused on building a healthy stand of turf grass, building root structure and increasing infiltration rates, aka the foundation. In 2022 we began to build the walls, concentrating our focus on grooming the greens, removing the grain that had been allowed to grow over the years and increasing our bentgrass population, while continuing to increase our infiltration rates. The final step is the roof of the house, providing consistent turf conditions on the greens everyday throughout the season. In 2022 we took the opportunity in the spring and fall to push the turf and see what was possible, testing out different methods and products to help us achieve our goals. In the coming season we will be implementing these processes on a regular basis to provide consistent conditions.

As we increased green speed this past year, which became normal during the fall months, we found that our process of a front-middle-back rotation with hole locations wasn’t aligning with the greens speeds. Quite often we ran into situations where there weren’t any acceptable hole locations for the required rotation. The infamous hole on 4 in October is a prime example of this, according to the rotation it was supposed to be a back pin location, however, with the speed of the greens that day, there were no acceptable back pin locations. Our setup guy did the best he could to find a location that worked, but we all know how that went.

So, as were raising the bar, we’re also going to make some adjustments to mitigate that happening again. Our goal for 2023 greens speed will be an 11.5 for daily play and 12-12.5 for tournament play. We are going to move away from the front-middle-back rotation on greens but keep the color-coded flags. Hole locations will be selected based on the current speed of the greens, employees will be trained on selecting fair hole locations. We will be passing out our greens book so they have a visual representation of the slope percentage on the greens when selecting hole locatations. Flags will still be color coordinated based on hole locations on the greens, red front, white middle, and blue back, but we will be selecting the rotation based on fair hole locations. What does this mean? You will probably play more than 6 front, middle, and back locations during your round. This gives us the freedom to go back to back middle locations, or front, back, front, middle, front if we need to, to keep the hole locations as fair as possible.

Our goal is fair and consistent greens and hole locations year round, this change will significantly help us achieve that goal and provide you a more pleasurable and memorable round. Everyone on the GCM staff is excited for the upcoming season and truly letting the course shine in a way it never has.