What's your style?

Published June 24, 2010

Bunkers are trimmed and edged with the precision of a barber with a straight-edge razor. It’s no surprise superintendents spend a large percentage of their budgets and labor maintaining them. Photo: Dellwood Hills Golf ClubSit down in your barber’s chair and the first question he’ll likely ask is, “So, what will it be?” Your answer will depend on the look you like. Maybe it’s a little off the top or maybe it’s a lot. When it comes to a superintendent’s practices for trimming and edging bunkers, the same questions arise.

Traditionally, bunkers were designed as a hazard to penalize players who strayed too far from the fairway. Watch any PGA Tour event today and you’ll notice most pros prefer landing in a bunker to the rough. Sand is finer and comes in more shades of white than at a Caribbean resort. Golfers expect pristinely maintained bunkers. While they are still deemed a hazard, they are more often an architect’s stroke of beauty, rather than a trap that leads to a penalizing stroke – a well-manicured bunker can really set off a golf hole. Bunkers are trimmed and edged with the precision of a barber with a straight-edge razor. It’s no surprise superintendents spend a large percentage of their budgets and labor maintaining them.

“When I first got into the business we would weed bunkers twice a month,” says Matt Shaffer, superintendent at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa., who estimates he spends 20 percent of his budget on maintaining bunkers. “Now, golfers don’t want to see a weed in there.”

Merion’s East Course is known for its perilous bunkers. It has played host to more USGA Championships than any course in America and it is set to host the U.S. Open in 2013. Shaffer says they edge the 130 bunkers on the East Course just enough, so they don’t grow into the traps by using a pitchfork, which gives them a rugged look.

“The bunkers at Merion are critical,” Shaffer says. “They are famous and are a strong architectural feature. We try desperately to keep them rugged, but in good shape.”

Merion’s bunkers on the East Course are built out of such fine textured clay to hold their dramatic features that nothing grows on them except fescue. They’ve tried growing a multitude of grasses, but they just don’t grow since the soil is so tight and the south-facing bunkers get brutally hot. They are designed like a solar shield to absorb the heat versus laying back on a more general angle that would repose the heat.

In contrast, the bunkers on Merion’s West Course were redone about five years ago; they have a Sand Trapper bunker liner, so Shaffer and his crew don’t edge these as much.

“To keep the shape of the bunker, but not to go down the edge of the bunker, we just trim them, not taking off too much sod,” Shaffer says. “We just give them a high, tight haircut with a reciprocator. A lot of people use reciprocators because they cut real fine and you can’t get into the sand with them or it destroys them, so it encourages you just to keep that edge on it all the time. Every once in a while, we will lose the edge and we will have to go back in and re-edge them, but we try desperately to refrain from that because then you run the risk of cutting the bunker liner and sand will migrate down and affect the integrity of the sand.”

Burning fescue on bunkers is more environmentally effective than using pesticides, says Merion GC’s Matt Shaffer. Photo: Merion Golf ClubBurn, bunker, burn?
This past season Shaffer started a new experiment by burning some of the fescue on the East Course’s bunkers after communicating to members and neighbors about the environmental benefits to this approach.

“This technique is far more environmentally effective than bombarding bunker faces with pesticides and it accomplishes the same thing,” he explains. “The bunkers look rugged for a while after they are burned, but there are no weeds and very little insect damage. It also thins out the bunkers so they are easier to play out of.”

It’s just a matter of labor
Don Singlehurst, superintendent at Royal Colwood Golf Club in Victoria, B.C., Canada, says his crew puts 50-60 hours of labor over a seven-day week to maintain the 63 bunkers at this private, parklands course. He has one employee dedicated to maintaining bunkers; it’s still not enough.

“In a perfect world I would devote at least 100 hours per week to managing bunkers,” he says. Singlehurst’s crew does an aggressive edging in the early spring and fall using hand-edgers to give a crisp, clean edge, which may require redefining the bunker edges since sometimes a bit of sod is removed. So, over a long period of time, the bunkers get bigger.

Royal Colwood is in the midst of a bunker restoration project that aims to bring the bunkers back to the way they would have been in the 1920s.

“We just built three where we have a flat bottom and a sod face,” he explains. “Eventually, we will be cutting those faces with flymowers – we won’t have sand going up the faces of the bunkers.”

The challenge Singlehurst has with his bunker edges is they tend to dry out through the heat of the summer with sand splashing up and with a lack of irrigation that is not specific for bunkers. The bunker renovation plan includes installing sprinkler heads specifically for the bunkers. “It’s been quite successful in keeping them green and retaining grass as opposed to the old-school method of having a sprinkler head in the rough or on the fairway and whatever was thrown over would catch the bunker,” he says.

The veteran greenkeeper also has to contend with damage caused by deer and some other hungry nocturnal creatures.

“We have a huge problem with raccoons digging up our edges looking for a food source,” Singlehurst says. “They attack the edges that are dry. As the sand builds up through play, or the heat of the day, there is nothing to retain the lip, or retain the moisture; the raccoons dig up all these areas and cause massive damage.”

Besides having nice, fluffy sand, the other critical thing about bunkers from the golfers’ point of view is they need to know exactly where the edge is. That is probably why edging is done, more so than aesthetics, Singlehurst says.
“When the edges are undefined, a player could question, ‘Am I in the bunker or out?,’ he explains. “It’s a big deal for rulings. That’s where our aggressive edging in spring and fall comes in to define those edges, so the golfer will know if they are in a hazard or not.”

San Francisco’s Presidio Golf Course takes a minimalist approach to its bunker maintenance, which gives them a more traditional look and feel. Photo: Presidio Golf CourseMinimalist maintenance at famed California muni
Brian Nettz, CGCS, Presidio Golf Course in San Francisco, Calif., takes a minimalist approach to the maintenance of the popular muni’s 64 bunkers. He aims to use less money and less labor – harkening back to a more traditional look and feel. As one of the most popular public courses in the Bay Area, Presidio hosts approximately 70,000 rounds per year. Nettz says if bunkers were more of a priority he would need a dedicated crew just to replace the lost sand.

“I’m trying to get away from edging the bunkers,” Nettz explains. “We’ve decided to go for more of an antique look by not edging certain parts of the bunker and rolling the turf species over the lip and just letting it go. We’ve been experimenting with removing maintained turf on our lips and our capes and putting in some lower-maintenance or some maintenance-free turfs to reduce our hand-watering.”

Nettz lets the edges of the bunkers’ green side get “nasty,” so they can focus more on the edges away from the bunkers and keep those clean. They are experimenting with what turf species works best.

Some muni courses are on shoestring budgets and they’ve gone back to the philosophy that the bunker is a hazard, adopting the approach, “we will get to them when and if we get to them.” Presidio is trying to find a middle ground. “We can maintain less sand surface area to a higher level with the same amount of people,” Nettz says.

Presidio is very environmentally-minded. Nettz’ philosophy behind his bunker maintenance program stays true to this sustainable approach. Since his labor levels weren’t set to increase, Nettz had to come up with a solution to still maintain them to a high standard, but with less people. The answer: fewer and smaller hazards.

“If our proposed bunker project goes through, our goal is a net loss in bunker surface area – that would give a net gain to use elsewhere,” Nettz says. “We are looking at smaller bunkers and perhaps fewer bunkers, which will make our bunker maintenance dollars every year go further.”

Whether you’re looking for a high, tight haircut, a neat trim, or some shaggy curls, superintendents today approach their bunkers the same way barbers approach their clients’ hair – with perfection, precision and an understanding that golfers expect the same level of care for maintaining these so-called hazards.