How We Do It: Becoming a turf star on YouTube

Valley Brook Country Club Superintendent John Shaw produces online videos to better educate committee and club members to the goings on at the McMurray, Pa., golf course. Now he’s ready to take turf maintenance viral.

“This all started with my desire to find a better way to educate the grounds committee on airification at our club.
“I created these videos and showed them during grounds committee meetings. I asked my committee to watch the videos to gain a better understand about how and why we do airification so that they could pass this information on to our members.

But over time you lose and gain new grounds committee members and those who have been around for years weren’t interested in watching these same videos over and over.

“But the second year I played the video, I could tell that the guys who’d seen the video the year before really didn’t want to see it again. Their eyes were starting to glaze over a little bit.

“So I’d heard about YouTube and I thought if I could post the videos there, then the committee could check the videos out at their own convenience. Ultimately, this would really benefit the new members on the committee.

“That’s really how it all got started, but then I built a Web page with a blog so I could better educate the members about what we were doing on the golf course. After about a year, though, I decided to link the information and the videos through the country club’s Web page. There, members can go to my section and watch the videos directly from there, which links right to YouTube.

“I started with a video on airification, but then I wanted to educate committee members and the club’s members about our overall general maintenance practices on the course. For example, I have a video on there about how we top dress the fairways. Members see us out there doing it, but they may not know why where out there and why we’re doing this. Now, if I ever have a member ask me why we’re doing this I can explain the process to them and then have them check out the video that’s available on the club’s Web page that explains exactly how the process goes.

“I’ve also used this to film trees that we intended to cut down for a variety of reasons. I did this because cutting down a tree on a golf course can be controversial. Now you may go through the proper procedure and inform the committee as to why this is happening, but many times the members don’t know. By video taping the tree that is in poor shape, and by pointing out what was wrong and why we were removing it, when a members asks why we cut down such a beautiful tree I can use the video to explain that it was actually half dead.

“In the future I want to start filming our construction projects, such as building a tee from the ground up, and then post those to the Web for the members.

“Overall, I feel like I’ve received a good return on my overall investment in making and posting the videos to the club’s Web site because I’ve received good feedback from committee members and club members about the videos and how helpful they are in gaining a better understanding of what we do and why we do things on the course.

 “I’ve also received positive feedback from people whom I least expected, like the Penn State turf program. I recently attended a conference and asked one of the educators there if they’d watched any videos on turf maintenance. He said, “Yeah, I just showed a video in one of my classes about a guy aerifying a putting green.” I said, “Really, did it happen to be ‘VBCC Grounds’ because that’s my video.” It was.

“I’ve also heard that one of the professors at our community college in Pittsburgh is using my videos for the same reason. He recognized the course and called me to make sure I was okay with him using the videos.

“From a cost standpoint, the only major cost is for the camera. The first camera I bought cost about $300. Beyond that the only other cost is in my time. It did take some time to learn how to transfer the video from the camera to the computer, to edit down the videos to less than 10 minutes and then how to post them to the Web site and to YouTube. Through trial and error I learned that it pays to buy a more expensive camera that transfers the video digitally, which saves a lot of time.”