(Design conceptions column) A twist on course plans

I have been discussing with a few clubs developing something other than a master plan for them. I call it a theme book or a premaster plan. This is a new twist on course planning for me.

The idea is that you, as a superintendent, do many things in-house without going to the expense of using an architect. Now, I could, and probably should, spend the rest of this column debating the wisdom of that, but for the moment, I’ll agree you probably don’t need to call me or my brethren always to help you when you decide to stabilize a creek bank or plant a few trees.

Any change you make to your course is subject to criticism from just about anyone who plays the course, and in many cases, even from folks who simply drive by. And, you continually hear suggestions from well-meaning golfers who don’t understand why you can’t implement their great ideas. The clubs I’ve discussed this with realize it might be handy for their superintendents to have a preconceived guide to such changes, justifying them in the context of the overall theme of the club, their maintenance budget and construction options that fit both.

A complete master plan, with phasing and cost recommendations, addresses in-house changes. But many master plans and/or renovations stem from a laundry list of specific problems noted by members, the committee or the superintendent. Then, clubs dive right into changes without looking at deeper, underlying issues. It’s comparable to a freshman not wanting to start with basic 101-level courses and preferring to jump right into graduate-level courses.

While this preplanning process should be the start of any master plan, it can be almost as valuable, even if your consulting architect draws an example plan only, perhaps using one typical hole, or no plans at all. It’s important to start at the beginning.

A golf course theme is often overlooked as a basic guide to design, but perhaps it’s more important than most people realize. Courses can look like Augusta National or Pine Valley if the proper planning is implemented. Landscaping is an obvious example of emulating a course. If you want your course to have a refined look, similar to Augusta National, then you might lean toward formal flowers and exotic trees for your landscaping. If you want the rugged look and feel of Pine Valley, native grasses and trees would be a better choice.

In these premaster plans, frank talk about budgeting is essential to setting your course. In one case, a club wanted a formal look. However, when surveying the budgets of top clubs in the area, we found its budget was about 80 percent of those top clubs, and its members weren’t keen about major dues increases. I was surprised to see the top dozen courses in the area had $1-million budgets, and the 13th had a maintenance budget of $998,000.

For example, when you propose plantings — which are maintenance items above and beyond an essential maintenance budget of perhaps $600,000 — to carry out a  formal look, it seems quite obvious the course should have fewer high-maintenance landscaped areas than the highest budgeted clubs. The logical conclusion is that if similar but higher-budgeted clubs have an acre of annual flowers, then your club should have no more than 0.8 acre of annual flowers, and probably less, because flower maintenance is a higher percentage of the discretionary budget.

The preplan then would allocate the areas of highest impact for plantings, such as at the front entry, clubhouse, first and 10th tees and any multiple tees where the same flowers can be viewed twice. Then, if someone gets the idea that a new flower bed is perfect for the 14th tee, you have justification for saying no.

Using creek bank stabilization as another example, the options include leaving the bank as dirt, adding native vegetation or using a hard surface, such as gabion walls, cement bags or a formal retaining wall. A Pine Valley-themed course would presumably opt for native vegetation, assuming the strength of flooding doesn’t dictate the hard surface, but a formal course probably needs a hard surface. The issue in that case would be looks versus cost. It might be that any work in critical-view areas receives a more expensive wall, and areas well hidden receive less expensive treatments.

This plan can go through a general and detailed discussion of every area of concern on your course – tees (size, shape and style, orientation, access and circulation), greens, bunkers (styles and type, whether to use fabric liner), fairway and fairway-tree-corridor width, grass types, ponds, cart paths, etc. to determine, in order, what best fits your theme, what best fits your budget and what your most practical options are. As with comparable budgets, it might be handy to include pictures of similar clubs and solutions they’ve found successful — especially with things such as using new grass types — as a guide to your improvements.

What’s missing from these nontraditional documents is a phasing plan. Many golf course changes don’t fit a schedule well. Natural conditions, such as freeze or flood, change priorities and budgets. What’s added is an in-depth discussion of the deeper, underlying assumptions behind any recommendation for change presented in a binder.

Depending on how familiar your architect is with your course, costs should be less than a complete master plan. Depending on how much he or she is planning to write about the subject, your theme book might vary from a thin document to a coffee-table book located in the clubhouse for easy viewing. The cover of this book or binder should be of soft leather to connote an air of authority and to soften the blow of the superintendent’s finger as he points and jabs at it when discussing changes with members.

Sharing the information about how you decide to maintain the course with your members via this type of document can provide valuable interaction with them. Most importantly, if you’re in the market for architectural advice, tweaking the traditional master plan format to something like this premaster plan format might prove to be a better tool to keep renovations on a consistent path for your club or course. GCN

Jeffrey D. Brauer is a licensed golf course architect and president of Golfscapes, a golf course design firm in Arlington, Texas. Brauer, a past president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, can be reached at jeff@jeffreydbrauer.com.