A course and its caretaker

Bill Kupfer is the first superintendent in the short history of Southern Delaware Golf Club. The course could remain open and in full swing for the next couple centuries and there might never be a more appropriate person to tend to its turf.

Both have deep ties to Delaware.

Both have deep ties to golf.

Both veered off course.

Both have returned — through struggle, through hard work.

If a person can resemble a golf course — in ethos, if not in turf type — it is Kupfer and Southern Delaware Golf Club.

Kupfer started his career when he was still in high school. The summer he was 17, he had a lifeguard job lined up, but his grandparents, Louis and Doris Kupfer, steered him away from “just sitting on the beach.” He wound up at Rehoboth Country Club in Rehoboth Beach, which was, as it happened, about to start an in-house renovation. That first season under superintendent Ed Brown, Kupfer filled drainage lines with wheelbarrows packed with pea gravel, helped rebuild greens, and did everything short, he says, of operating heavy machinery. And he was hooked. “It was what I wanted to do,” he says, “and I knew I was always going to do it.”

It just took him a while to find his way back. After earning a business degree at nearby Goldey-Beacom College in Wilmington, Kupfer wanted to do something more with his life. He drove to Dover, walked down a row of military recruiters, and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was in boot camp two months later.

Over nearly a decade of service, he found himself aboard a boat in and around the Hudson River, providing security following 9/11, then down in New Orleans, helping his neighbors recover after Hurricane Katrina. He was in Baton Rouge when the storm hit and rode it out on a small boat on the Mississippi River. Those years still stick with him.

“Just to be in New York,” he says. “The smells, the sights, … it was humbling. ‘We’re the strongest nation in the world. Who can touch us?’ And they touch us by stealing an airplane. And Katrina, you watch all these people suffer, people who lived down the street from you just begging for bottles of water or for help to get out of the water.”

Kupfer was almost halfway to a military pension, but the toll of those events — both in service and personally, as Katrina destroyed his home — steered him back toward golf course maintenance. He enrolled at Louisiana State University, where he had wanted to start studying when he was still a teenager, and started his next chapter. After earning his second degree, this one in the more practical field of turf and turfgrass management, he started his agronomic climb.

Assistant superintendent at Glen Riddle Golf Club in Maryland. Assistant superintendent at Concord Country Club in Pennsylvania, where he worked under Greg D’Antonio, whom he considers one of his two mentors. A run of projects with Billy Casper Golf. The head position at Black Bear Golf Club, part of Louisiana State Parks, which he figured would be his “forever job” until the state’s perilous financial situation turned a dream into a nightmare. Three years as one of so many golf course superintendents at The Villages in Florida, where the game is pretty much life.

At The Villages, Kupfer was responsible for 27 holes. “It was a great job,” he says, “but it just beat me down. Literally from sunup to sundown, there’s a tee time every seven minutes. Even when we overseeded, we were supposed to have water windows — they played right through it. It just got to the point where it was too much. I had to get away from it.”

He moved back to Delaware with an old friend with whom he had reconnected — Johnna Jensen, who is now his fiancée — and despite planning for a break from the industry, wound up working at Wild Quail Golf & Country Club in Wyoming with Kurt Wittman, whom he considers his other mentor.

And then, in early 2023, he received an offer to close a circle he had opened decades earlier.

Southern Delaware Golf Club opened in May, but it has been a golf course, more or less, for the last 64 years. Long called Shawnee Country Club, the course opened in Milford in 1960 with nine holes, adding nine more in 1981. Kupfer played it back then. Ownership sold it in 2011 to another local group who renamed it The Rookery. Kupfer played it then, too.

The course and the club seemed fine until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike so many other golf courses that weathered the initial dips in play and revenue before the boom of the last four years, The Rookery struggled. The course closed on New Year’s Day 2021, its future uncertain. The land remained empty for two full years. Grass shot up. The outline of the golf course disappeared a little more every day.

Enter Tim Johnson and his son Matt Johnson, local business leaders steeped in construction. The pair purchased the course in December 2022 for $3.8 million, according to land records. Within days of the purchase, they told reporters they planned to change the zoning but wanted to keep the golf course. That plan never wavered. They soon called Kupfer.

“I always loved the course,” Kupfer says. “They didn’t have to do any selling on that. What they sold me on is their word is in stone. I trusted them just with two interviews, knowing that everything else they’ve touched in this community has been gold. When they told me they were fully invested, I knew they were going to do it right. I knew they weren’t going to half-ass it.”

Kupfer started in February 2023. The grass, he says, “was three feet tall. You couldn’t see anything. It just looked like a big field.

“And we just kind of went from there.”

Kupfer hooked up a brush hog and mowed the whole property. Then he hopped on a zero-turn mower, raised it to its highest setting, and mowed the property again. Then he dropped the zero-turn another inch and mowed it again. By that point, a couple weeks in, “you could start to see the golf course,” Kupfer says.

He started to hire a crew, high school and college students early on, most of whom stopped showing up after a while. Then he started to find the right people. Most of the crew working today have been on the course since the end of last summer, including assistant superintendents Cody White and Mike Tkach, and irrigation technician Dawson Dillon, one of the few high schoolers who hung on and who is now working on his turf degree online.

Matt Johnson was as invested as anybody. With plenty of construction experience, he operated most of the heavy equipment — which his Johnson Companies already owned — and shaped most of the course despite having never worked on a golf course.

“It was a relief to me because I didn’t have to explain it,” Kupfer says. “He could see it. He has an engineering degree, so he understands surface drainage, underground drainage, he gets all that. And my God, I had so many superintendents ask me who our construction crew was because he was just amazing with all the shaping he could do.”

Kupfer also relished working with Tim Johnson, who, like his son, had never worked on a golf course but still shared plenty of lessons.

“He could see the numbers and the construction, but he didn’t understand how it really worked,” Kupfer says. “Having the chance to work with him and teach him, give him expertise, and also learn some stuff from him was fantastic. He had this way of laying sod, and of course it works much better.”

The course layout is largely similar to the longtime track on the property. Most greens are larger now and there are about a dozen fewer bunkers. Hundreds of trees have been cleared — some of which stood in the middle of bunkers. The drainage system is new. And the irrigation system is finally a little more modern. Thank goodness.

“The irrigation system was very minimal,” Kupfer says. “It was single-row. A lot was from the 1960s, a lot was from the ’80s, so one of the first projects we did, we replaced all eight satellite control boxes, we replaced every irrigation head on the golf course, and then we needed a new computer central system. We went with Toro Lynx. And then our pump panels had to be redone. And then there was an ungodly amount of leaks. We had three or four a week. It was a struggle.”

Kupfer opted for a variety of turfgrasses across the course, with Oasis Bermudagrass on the tees and fairways; 777 bentgrass on the greens, collars and half of the approaches; Innovation zoysiagrass around the bunkers; and, eventually, tall fescue for the rough, which remains a hodgepodge for now.

The whole project, from wild field to finished golf course, took less than 15 months.

The weather this year has provided an extra challenge for Southern Delaware — both the club and the area. To be fair, the weather this year has provided an extra challenge everywhere and Southern Delaware has been no different. A little more exaggerated, perhaps. Almost a little more hyperbolic.

Nine inches of rain in a single night. Frost as late as April 26. More than 90 percent of average annual rainfall by Tax Day — and then 45 of the next 90 days at 90 degrees or warmer, with winds whipping at least 10 miles per hour and absolutely no rain. But Kupfer knows better than to complain.

“Everybody else in the Mid-Atlantic had this weather as well,” he says. “The Delmarva Peninsula has been horrible. I know some guys who have been in the industry 30-plus years and have never seen it this bad around this area.

“I literally threw up my hands with Mother Nature. ‘I don’t know what I did to offend you!’”

The wild weather pushed back the planned reopening exactly a month, from April 1 to May 1. There is still work to do. A new practice putting green. A covered hitting bay — “our version of Topgolf,” Kupfer says. A 19th hole some time next year. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. After two years of vacancy and another year and change of construction, Milford was ready for more golf.

“We sold out of memberships, 225, and we have a waiting list,” Kupfer says. “And the daily play! The ones who come out every single day, the seniors every morning, the ladies on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they’re all a part of it.” Kupfer estimates that the semi-private course has averaged about 100 rounds per day, with a peak around 140. Depending on how long the weather holds, the club could hit 20,000 rounds during its first season.

Southern Delaware Golf Club seems to be all the way back. So does Bill Kupfer.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor. He has now written a quartet of course revival stories since 2019. If you know of another good one, let him know at mlawell@gie.net.