Walk this way... ride that way

As golf course superintendents in many parts of the country yank the throttle on purchasing decisions, they are contemplating a question many never pondered a decade ago: Is it time to swap their walking greensmowers for a few triplexes?

This isn’t a trick question, and there’s no right or wrong answer. Like most industry questions, solutions are concocted on a course-by-course basis.

All decisions require thorough analysis, especially ones involving greens, the most valuable square footage on a golf course. Plenty of superintendents will be making decisions regarding greens mowing this year. Twenty-four percent of the 569 superintendents who participated in GCI’s State of the Industry survey indicated they are planning to purchase a greensmower in 2015.

Some are weighing the decision Jeff Clemmons faced in 2011. Following a shakeup that resulted in Clemmons holding the top agronomic post at Lake Hickory Country Club in Hickory, N.C., he approached the private club’s decision-makers about hiring more full-time help because of increasing struggles to complete routine maintenance tasks before workers encountered daily play.

Clemmons made his request in the middle of a steep economic downturn. When the club cited budgetary reasons for not hiring more help, he intensified his search for alternative solutions. The search led him to explore – and eventually adopt – using riding instead walking mowers at the 36-hole facility. “If you have to do more with less and if you have to do what I have done and nothing goes down, and if anything quality and appearance has increased, it was just a no-brainer for our greens committee to give us the OK to go with that,” he says.

A private course unleashing triplexes on its greens once seemed like an unlikely scenario.

Jacobsen released the first riding greens mower in 1968, the Greens King, a venerable innovation with principles still implemented in today’s triplexes. “You can take a reel off one of the original units and the geometry and the cutting unit has remained very, very stable,” Jacobsen product manager Chris Fox says.

Sonny Faust, the superintendent at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla., decided to use riding mowers to maintain the greens for the 1977 U.S. Open. A curious decision at the time, Faust explained the move in a 1979 USGA Green Section article co-authored with West Region director Donald D. Hoos. The USGA required green speeds of 8 feet, 6 inches for the Open, a mark Southern Hills exceeded by maintaining speeds of 9 feet. In a question-and-answer portion of the article with Hoos, Faust says greens were double mowed at 5⁄64th of-an-inch the week prior to and during the tournament.

Big events like the U.S. Open raised the stakes for greens maintenance. Toro senior marketing manager for greens mowers Helmut Ullrich says achieving a “TV-type scenario” with smaller stripes led to numerous innovations and sparked a boom in walk mowing.

“Back in the ‘80s, walking started to come in,” says Ullrich, who started working with greens mowers exclusively in 1980. “There were some courses that walked, but not very many. But as tournaments on TV became more popular, customers wanted what they saw on TV and walkers came in. Labor wasn’t a big issue and then the heights of cuts were dropped.”

Customers still wanted what they saw on TV in 2008. Labor, though, was becoming an issue because of an economic downturn, which resulted in reductions in rounds played, club memberships and smaintenance budgets. “I visited courses throughout the world and you would see a lot of courses that were walk mowing before move to the riding greensmowers because of budget concerns,” John Deere Golf product manager Tracy Lanier says. “Staffs on some courses had been reduced to the point where they just couldn’t afford to walk mow anymore.”

Exceptions, of course, exist. Wayne Rath, the superintendent at Magna Golf Club in Aurora, Ontario, is responsible for maintaining a private 18-hole course with bentgrass greens measuring between 5,500 and 6,000 square feet each. The course receives between 13,000 and 16,000 rounds per year, with members spending their winters at upscale courses in warmer climates before returning to Ontario in late-spring. “They want the ultimate golf experience every day, so we have to manage our practices around that,” Rath says.

Walk mowing greens is a practice Rath has never considered changing. His crew can swell to as many as 50 workers during peak months. Six employees combine to walk mow all 18 greens in two hours. Design considerations also make Rath a walk-mowing stalwart. Magna’s bunkers and greens are separated by small gaps.

“We don’t use triplexes on the greens other than for cultural practices like verticutting or scarifying or whatever we are doing,” Rath says. “We have the attachments for that. We are strictly walkers. We are trying to get the triplex on there as minimally as possible. We have bunkers that are tight to the front and sides, and that makes it difficult. There’s only one way to triplex and you would have to triplex it the same direction every day, so it’s just not an option. We are looking for the look of the walkers as well.”

Clemmons manages a smaller staff at Lake Hickory, and he needed six workers to walk mow 36 greens. Devoting the majority of his labor resources to greens mowing placed Lake Hickory’s crew into a precarious spot.

“We were always behind,” he says. “I would send six guys out to walk mow and two guys to change cups, and that was it. We were mowing grass until 9, 10 o’clock. Now, when I went to ride mowing, I would send out two guys to mow, two guys changing cups, two guys mowing fairways, two guys mowing the tees and approach and collar areas. We were are all going out first thing in the morning and staying ahead of the golfers. All that’s completed before lunch.”

Cleaning creek and pond banks, removing trees and fine-tuning bunker are among the jobs Lake Hickory has placed into regular maintenance schedules because of the time saved by using ride mowers. The frequency of rolling also has increased since the mowing transition, with the crew rolling greens three times per week. Clemmons says he has saved time without sacrificing quality or making his greens susceptible to turf damage caused by hydraulic leaks.

The threat of hydraulic leaks ranks as a major concern among superintendents considering a switch from walking to riding greens mow. Hybrid technology reducing hydraulic lines has eased apprehension. “I think this promotes superintendents to choose riders on the greens,” Toro’s Ullrich says. “They always had that fear in the past. When a leak occurs, it’s always on tournament day it seems like. That fear is eliminated to a great extent.”

Fox says he envisions the industry moving toward more electric offerings. “I see the industry going much more toward an ell-electric machine,” he says. “You’re starting to see things creeping in more and more. As we start to see more and more electrics and completely electric machines, we will continue to move forward because they eliminate risks environmentally and from a hydraulic leak standpoint. That’s a major concern for a superintendent when he’s using a triplex machine. A lot of the decision revolves around no hydraulic leaks.”

Lanier, who started working with John Deere Golf products in 1995, has watched the number of blades on reels expand and heights of cut lower to a point where superintendents can maintain greens to a 1/100,000th-of-an-inch. He says one major factor will determine the future of greens mowing.

“It really depends on the turf,” Lanier says. “You’re only going to be able to get what the turf is able to give you. Right now with the heights we are at and the speeds we are getting, you can get some pretty fast green speeds and the cut quality is very good. I guess we just have to wait and see where our customers are going to push the greens as far as what’s the next thing you need to achieve.”