‘It’s God’s playground’

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An Augusta, Georgia, club is celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2024. The club occupies joyous land crafted into a lasting golfscape by a Golden Age juggernaut. Holes drop and rise through pleasant pines and myriad deciduous trees. Rae’s Creek, America’s most well-known golf waterway, bisects the northeast corner of the property.

A plaque on the elongated 14th tee reminds members and guests that Bobby Jones aced the uphill par 3 on Jan. 13, 1932. Fellow Augusta golf visionaries Fielding Wallace, Alfred Bourne and George Bourne were in his foursome. Trophies, photographs, drawings and artifacts inside the clubhouse tout the achievements of local golf legends, female and male tour players, and visionaries whose activities at the club shaped their community’s history.

Augusta Country Club is a locally and regionally prominent club supported, guided and preserved by Augusta, Georgia, denizens such as Ben Barfield. With the plaque honoring Jones’s shot less than 20 yards away, Barfield stops operating a Toro Greensmaster eTriFlex 3360 for two minutes on a late-March Tuesday morning at the urging of director of grounds Josh Dunaway to discuss the place where he’s worked for nearly three decades.

“It’s God’s playground,” Barfield says.

Members sneaking in rounds before projected rain are approaching the ninth green, one of three putting surfaces visible from the 13th green. Little time for small talk. Working at Augusta Country Club means being surrounded by golf. But there’s just enough time to learn how Barfield feels about where he works before he must complete mowing a green with an open and horizontal-shaped front. “I don’t just like it here,” he says, pausing to emphasize his next four words, “I love it here.”

Affection comes in many forms for a golf course and club. At Augusta Country Club, the strongest sign of affection comes from seeing the same people relishing their time roaming and honing heavenly land. Names on membership rosters and payrolls are recognizable, because familiarity and longevity yield deep connections.

“They treat us like family here,” says head turf technician Ron Magnuson, a 29-year employee. “It’s not like you’re in a corporation and you’re just a number.” Magnuson and Keith Campbell started working at Augusta Country Club in 1995; Barfield joined the crew a year later. They have welcomed more people into their work family over the years.

“That’s kind of something I pay attention to whenever I’m interviewing at a course — the staff that’s there,” says senior assistant superintendent Ryan McGee, who joined the crew in August 2021. “Whenever you see long-tenured employees, that’s a sign it’s a good place to work because nobody is going to hang out somewhere that they don’t enjoy being at and don’t care about.”

Augusta Country Club has scaled to levels none of its founders or veteran employees envisioned. Originally designed by member Dr. William Harrison and golf pro David Ogilvie, the club’s Hill Course received a Donald Ross-guided transformation in 1926. A pair of downhill par 3s guarded by ponds and framed by pines and azaleas, an abundance of strategic approach bunkers, varied par 5s on the interior of the layout, and conditioning blending laborious grit with modern advancements make the Hill Course one of the most beloved layouts in Georgia. “The lay of the land just speaks for itself,” superintendent Dillon Scheer says. “You don’t need to say much else about it.” At one point, the club had two courses, but the Bon Air Hotel sold the land occupying the Seth Raynor-renovated Lake Course in 1942. A desirable neighborhood now sits atop the former Lake Course.

Ross routed the Hill Course on what Scheer, a digital map aficionado, considers an “L-shaped” plot. Scheer uses the alphabetical analogy to describe the overall shape of the land during a ground-level conversation to the left of an approach bunker on the 18th hole. Google Earth confirms Scheer’s observation. Google Earth also confirms that Augusta Country Club’s eighth and ninth holes abut a famous golf neighbor co-founded by Jones.

Unlike the famous golf neighborhood, members play Augusta Country Club year-round — and they play the course plenty. Augusta Country Club supports more than 30,000 annual rounds, a hearty total for a venerable private club. “We might be the busiest high-end private club in the Southeast,” says Dunaway, an Augusta native who returned to his hometown in January 2019 after superintendent stints at several Florida clubs, including the Ross-designed Country Club of Orlando.

Transitioning from sleepy — Magnuson says the club supported less than 15,000 annual rounds when he joined the crew in 1995 — to slammed means more of everything. A walk-and-talk inside Augusta Country Club’s multi-building maintenance facility with Dunaway and Magnuson provides insight into the tools and tactics for meeting expectations at a flourishing club.

Most conversations at Augusta Country Club begin with people. Magnuson says the crew hovered around 10 employees in the mid-1990s. Weekend crews numbered four. The team Dunaway leads has more than 30 peak-season golf course and grounds employees, including Scheer, McGee, second assistant Sean Muller and landscape superintendent Josh Devore. A half-dozen other employees are earning turfgrass management degrees or certificates despite having academic or advanced technical training in other industries. “We’re fortunate,” Dunaway says. “We don’t have a staffing problem.”

Similar employee longevity and loyalty exists throughout the club.

“It starts at the top with our board and leadership giving us the tools by listening to the experts in their departments,” general manager/COO Brett Ninness says. “They’ll ask, ‘What do you all need to be successful?’ They have given us those tools, and then it’s just driving that culture.”

Equipment emerges as the next topic during the walk-and-talk.

Augusta Country Club has undergone a turfgrass metamorphosis, with zoysiagrass becoming the year-round hitting surface in 2018 and TifEagle Bermudagrass replacing bentgrass on greens in 2022. A large Toro equipment fleet is responsible for mowing, rolling, grooming, aerifying and verticutting more than 60 acres of short-cut zoysiagrass and more than three acres of Bermudagrass greens and surrounds.

Fairway acreage more than doubled during the fairway conversion, as the club previously overseeded around 25 acres of fairways. The fleet included two fairway mowing units when Magnuson joined the crew. The current fleet includes five Toro 5610-D Reelmaster units. “We have at least twice as much equipment as we had not too long ago,” he says. “We have grown a lot.”

The crew shifts between mowing greens with Greensmaster 3360 eTriFlex riding units and Greensmaster Flex 1021 walking units. The Greensmaster 3360 eTriFlex offers Augusta Country Club an entry point into preparing surfaces using riding mowers with electrical components. Maintaining greens is an intricate task for Dunaway’s team, with double, triple and even circle cutting reoccurring summer practices using units with 14-blade reels. Bentgrass greens were mowed at .140 of an inch during the summer in the mid-1990s, according to Magnuson. The TifEagle greens have been mowed at under .100 of an inch during the summer.

Maintaining elite warm-season turf requires more than mowing or rolling. In a typical season, the course closes during one-week stretches in June and August for aggressive cultural practices. Tools such as three ProCore 1298 aerators for fairways and rough, three ProCore 648 aerators for greens and tees, and two Versa-Vac units for debris cleanup allow work to be executed in tight windows.

“It’s extremely useful to have that type of equipment and that type of high-quality equipment produces a high-quality result on the course,” Dunaway says. “Everybody involved with Toro that I have worked with has done a great job.”

Managing water efficiently is another key component of the golf maintenance operation. Dunaway tactfully delegates leadership roles to his management team and McGee oversees irrigation programs. Seven handheld soil moisture sensors reside in the office McGee shares with Scheer and Muller. A Toro Lynx irrigation system installed in 2016 helps Dunaway’s team achieve its playability goals. “Firm and fast is our mentality as long as it doesn’t compromise turf health,” he says.

Augusta Country Club will host one of Georgia’s most significant golf events during what could be the bounciest part of the 2024 season as the Georgia Amateur Championship returns to the club for the first time since 1991. Charlie Yates, Harvie Ward, Tommy Aaron, Brian Harman, Russell Henley, Harris English and Jones are among the past champions. The 2024 tournament is scheduled for mid-July.

Championship golf remains a part of Augusta Country Club’s heritage. The club hosted a women’s major, the Titleholders Championship, from 1936 to 1966, as well as the 1971 U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship. And, perhaps, no American city embraces a big golf event like Augusta.

“Augusta is a golf-centric community,” Dunaway says. “With that comes high standards and high expectations. For a club like this to be around for 125 years, that tells you they know how to run things, they know how to survive, they know how to do things right and they know how to treat people.”