Come earlier, stay longer, golf more

So much for an offseason.

As dually recognized by Rick Woelfel and Ron Furlong in the December 2022 and February 2023 issues of Golf Course Industry, respectively, golf’s maintained surge of post-pandemic popularity in traditional cool-season venues continues to put courses and superintendents to the test.

For some bookend trend: Superintendents in warm-weather markets with historically seasonal/snowbird play are also seeing the surge of rounds — and pivoting in response.

Per the National Golf Foundation’s Q1 Report from early May 2023, national rounds were up 17 percent when compared with the same January-March, pre-pandemic months of 2017-19. Compared to 2022, year-to-date rounds were up through April in multiple southern states, including North Carolina (8.1 percent), Georgia (6.4 percent), South Carolina (5.7 percent), and Texas (4.5 percent), and down just 0.6 percent in Florida, according to Golf Datatech. While fickle weather patterns (certainly in parts of California) aimed to quell said numbers, the macro and micro strongly suggest that the game’s national reach remains extremely healthy, while further intimating that golf-centric pockets of the country can anticipate no regress come summer seasons, which typically slow.

I’ll fly away (later)

With an inventory of nearly 100 golf courses, Naples, Florida, historically sees a summer slowdown with snowbirds swooping back to their Northeast and Midwest homes. In turn, superintendents have used these months to address all manner of projects.

Yet the game’s current surge has presented a new complexion of calendar and, with it, maintenance maps requiring enhanced creativity and malleability.

“The rise over this past golf season was stronger than it was during the actual COVID time,” says Jimmy Alston, director of agronomy at Eagle Creek Golf & Country Club in Naples, where’s he’s worked for the last 16 years. “In our area, people are, without a doubt, coming earlier and staying longer.”

Alston started seeing the surge in earnest last summer, when Eagle Creek experienced a 20 percent rise in rounds; in concert, the club — comprised of about 85 percent snowbirds, according to Alston — now has a substantial wait list and initiation fees have risen 30 percent.

“In the late spring season, the big story for us this year has been the number of reciprocal rounds,” continues Alston, noting that Eagle Creek is on a list of about 30 reciprocal clubs in the Naples area. “Last year, through May, we had about 300 reciprocal rounds; this year was closer to 800. For an upcoming (early June) day, we’ve got 100 on the tee sheet; our average for that day is 30.”

During a summer season in which he’d typically be running fairways and rough with spikers, addressing drainage projects and conducting root pruning, Alston is finding increased off-season rounds are often pressing pause on such work.

“We’re a month into our off-season, and I feel like we’re a month behind,” Alston says, adding that he also had to push back a scheduled mold control application. “We’ve got so much play that a lot of stuff that I traditionally would be doing now, I’m either not doing, or, if I am doing it, I’m slowed down because of all the play.”

At the bustling 36 holes of city-owned Indian Wells Golf Resort, Nick Leitner, after a history of work at private clubs, is entering his first summer as the property’s director of agronomy. Per neighboring prime publics across the Coachella Valley, IWGR has shown no slowdown amid a timeline that historically finds some cease after Easter.

To wit: IWGR’s first Saturday in June had 300 rounds between its two courses … and then 250 more the next day.

“It comes as a little bit of a shock, but it’s good to see,” Leitner says. “I want to make the courses as good as possible, which can sometimes be tough with all this play. But it’s good to see the game of golf flourishing.”

With flourish comes required flexibility.

“On the private side out here, once you hit the month of June, things slow down; here, I have two aerification events for both courses throughout the summer, and those are 17-day closures,” Leitner says during a late-spring conversation. “Just looking at our calendar for the month of June, we’ll have several shotguns over the next few (early June) days, and that means I need to get greens on one course fertilized and at the same time I need to make sure I’m spraying the greens on the other side. Lots of odds and ends, and looking at how we’re going solve this problem today.”

Equal enhancement in rounds is found across the fickle meteorology of the Southeast, where all-seasons play is common.

“We’ve always been busy, but now we’re even busier. We recently had a record of 271 players for a Thursday. I mean, for us, at 18 holes, that’s crazy,” says Patrick Murphy, superintendent for more than 19 years at semi-private The River Golf Club in North Augusta, South Carolina. “We expect that kind of play on the weekend, but during the week? Sometimes I’m like, ‘Do these people even have jobs?’”

More work for superintendents and crew often results in enhanced hours and/or adjusting in-day schedules.

“We get here at 5:30 in the morning, working with headlamps, trying to get done as much as we can before having to get around golfers,” Murphy says. “A lot of my guys don’t take lunch breaks anymore; they just take (short) breaks and work straight through the day until 1:30. That’s a change from years past.”

Adds Alston: “We just got to work more hours. You push projects back, you squeeze your window tighter, and you’ve got to get things done faster. It just means putting in more time, which does put some stress on your staff.”

Taking pressure off in-house crews doesn’t always result in seamless solutions.

“I think I’ve looked to outside contractors more, and I’m a guy who likes to do everything in-house,” Alston explains. “In our region, there’s a lot of golf course contactors, but, at the same time, because of the whole golf boom, pinning those guys down is tough. Those guys are slammed with work, and typically go for the bigger projects. A good example is we had one bunker and two tees that our architect drew up a few months ago. He sent the bid sheet out to 12 contractors, and we had two answers back. One of them had a stupid-high price and the other one told us he couldn’t do it until September.”

The clock and compressed calendar also tick toward days of the week.

“Our rounds have been up year over year. We’re now in the upper 30,000 mark for rounds, and we’re an equity club typically closed on Mondays,” says James Symons, director of agronomy at Anthem Country Club in Henderson, Nevada. “Now, it seems like we’re doing more Monday events. Because of the demand for play, they’re also pushing us to open for every holiday. There’s just more demand, and we’re now filled with our member wait list.”

On occasion, members simply need to measure expectations and know that there are only so many days in a week.

“At the end of the day, cart traffic is definitely piling up; you can see it. Now, we’re putting a lot of focus on that traffic control,” Symons adds. “And then special projects — aerifying, topdressing — things that we used to do when we were mostly closed on Mondays, now we need to do a little more of that in play.”

While the minute hands and membership lists extend up the ladder, a culture of clemency has also become a new norm for managing staffs amid a curious time for course labor.

“Now I’m here later,” Murphy adds, “until almost 4 o’clock a lot of times. Other than that, I feel like I have to be more lenient. It seems like after COVID, a lot of people don’t have the work ethic they used to have. Before, if a guy was a no-show, he was done. Now, we give ’em three strikes. And we used to never allow earbuds, but we’ve become more lenient on that, too.”

Talk through the times

While presciently eyeing upcoming mandatory water cuts, Symons endeavored a sizable renovation project at Anthem last summer that lasted through December 2022.

Not that the improvement turned off the faucet for a driven membership.

“We took on these big renovations in the midst, and even while doing our greens renovation, we were able to retain most everybody,” Symons says. “We were scared that when we took on the project and closed down for five months to regrass the fairways, that people would leave due to an assessment, due to being closed. We had two people leave.”

Puzzling together enhanced play with ongoing projects and required water cutbacks (up to 24 percent less water usage), Symons acknowledges a need to be more strategic. His key puzzle piece: employing constant communication via town hall meetings and a monthly newsletter, along with quarterly letters to members.

“We’re into a lot of turf removal now, and we’re also converting our range,” Symons says. “So there will be some inconvenience this year, but I think our membership gets it. Communication is huge in letting our members know what kind of hand we’re dealt here as a valley. We have to comply, otherwise we face huge fines in ’24 and beyond.”

Finding crucial minutes via members can derive huge results.

“One of the things we just passed with our members was pushing back first tee times,” Alston says. “It used to be 7:30 a.m., and we moved it to 8:04, and that’s year-round. It’s only 30 minutes in the morning, but that’s a lot. That’s something they’ve kind of given to us. And it’s been huge.”

At The River, a “semi-private” tag doesn’t dictate a semi-active tee sheet.

“There is some talk about going private, because we have so much outside play that some of the members are getting upset because they can’t get a tee time when they want one,” Murphy says. “We’d still allow outside rounds, but it would have to be with a member or be referred by a member.”

Added outcomes from lucid lines can come compliments of golf staff to help find pockets between play.

“It’s working closely with the pro shop, looking at when the last tee time for the day is and sitting down with my assistants to come up with a game plan that will work for everybody,” Leitner says. “It might be different routes to mow a green, timing the fertilizing or figuring out any gaps on the tee sheet.”

The mind meld might even mean looking (gulp) several years ahead. At IWGR, the mass of group play requires Leitner and his head pro to already plan out 2025.

“It’s really unique, in my opinion,” Leitner says, “in that we’ll go over the schedule for the next two or three years ahead with closures for overseed and closures for aerification so that these groups can go ahead and line up their visits.”

If pressure indeed reveals diamonds, then summer superintendents across the nation are earning their jewels amid the modern golf rush.

“It never ends and takes a lot of creative problem-solving that comes with the job,” Leitner concludes. “But when you’re able to get out there in the field and really make a difference — that’s one of the great things, one of the gratifying things about our industry.”

Judd Spicer is a Palm Desert, California-based writer and senior Golf Course Industry contributor.