The Whiteboard

{ Editor’s Notebook }

When superintendents golf

Trip to Midwest for John Deere Golf Pro-Am reaffirms importance of seeing game from golfer’s perspective.

By Guy Cipriano

Andrew Foy golfs once a week. He doesn’t loft drives and stroke putts to relax or satisfy competitive desires.

Foy squeezes regular play into a crammed schedule for work-related purposes. His job as the superintendent at the Valley Club of Montecito requires him to satisfy the golfing desires of the California club’s members.

“I don’t play for fun,” Foy says. “For me, it gives you a different aspect. From the agronomy side, you are going out there and looking at certain stuff. When you are actually playing, you are looking and hitting the ball from some areas that I would never normally go into. I might hit it from behind a tree and see something that I would never see.”

Foy joined superintendents and club managers from 23 states and six countries on July 7 to experience tournament golf from a participatory perspective as part of the John Deere Golf Pro-Am at the TPC Deere Run in Silvis, Ill. The pro-am coincided with the PGA Tour’s John Deere Classic and paired superintendents with colleagues and a tour player.

Superintendents didn’t play the back tees like the pros – 500-yard par 4s aren’t for everybody – but they hit from the same fairways, rough, bunkers and greens. Playing the D.A. Weibring-designed course the week of its annual PGA Tour appearance represented a once-in-a-career opportunity for many participants. “You don’t get out and see tournament-style courses all the time,” says Kurt Strother, superintendent at Eagle Ridge Golf Resort in Galena, Ill. “It blows you away instantaneously.”

Strother, like Foy, spent part of his round analyzing TPC Deere Run’s agronomic features. The maintenance shed behind the fourth tee and pump station along the fifth hole were parts of the course ignored by pros yet admired by superintendents.

Golfing on a regular basis represents an item on a superintendent’s to-do list that often doesn’t get accomplished. Spending four more hours on a golf course following an 11-hour workday is difficult to justify. But superintendents agree that golfing should be part of their job description.

Shawn Emerson, director of agronomy at Desert Mountain, a 108-hole facility in Scottsdale, Ariz., asks his superintendents to walk the course with putters and wedges. Even something as simple as hitting a few putts and chips can help a superintendent obtain a player’s perspective.

“We’re hurting ourselves by not doing more,” Emerson says. “We say we want to grow the game, well, we are not playing enough to grow the game. We keep saying we need people to play more golf. We need to play more golf. You see it from the perspective of the player. It makes a big difference.”

Eagle Ridge consists of 63 holes, leaving Strother with little time away from the course. But playing on somebody else’s energized Strother.

“We all have the mentality that we need to play, but we don’t because we spend enough hours on the course as is,” he says. “But we do like to play and we need to see it from a golfer’s eyes. What you see here is not so much a comparison to the golf course that I’m working on, but it gives you a sensation of what you are doing and what these guys are doing to prepare for an event like this. You almost get a little recharged from it. You take it back to your own course and do some of the attention to detail work.”
 

California enacts statewide water restrictions for golf

State water board approves emergency regulation requiring local cutbacks.

Kyle Brown

Water districts throughout California are required to develop and activate water contingency plans, after an emergency resolution passed by the State Water Resources Control Board July 15.

The board, a department within the California EPA, adopted the resolution to mandate minimum conservation efforts across the state. Under the rule, local water districts with a water shortage contingency plan must put it into practice.

For golf courses, that conservation must limit irrigation of ornamental landscapes with potable water to no more than two days each week or implement plans to reduce water use by a comparable amount of a landscape’s 2013 water use total, says Max Gomberg, senior environmental scientist for the State Water Resources Control Board.

“It’s a little unfair,” says Craig Kessler, director of government affairs for the Southern California Golf Association. “If you’re dealing with golf courses that have been on restriction, that have invested in new nozzles, smart irrigation systems and removed acres of turf and gotten their water footprint substantially down in the last five or 10 years; then there’s another golf course that’s been completely profligate.

“Then you put percentages decreased based on a last year baseline – what you’re doing is you’re killing one course and doing a favor for the other.”

Either restriction puts outdoor irrigation roughly in line with the 20 percent water use reduction requested by California governor Jerry Brown at the beginning of the year. They both should have about the same effect on the overall use total, Gomberg says.

“The message we’re trying to send here is that everyone can do more, even if it’s a little bit more,” Gomberg says. “I think every golf course, even ones that have been good stewards of water, they can do more even if it’s getting pinpoint-accurate about times of day and the amount of water that’s applied to the green or leaving everything else unwatered or minimally watered.”

The restrictions only affect potable water. There are currently no restrictions on the use of recycled water, which can be a resource for outdoor irrigation. Offering non-potable water as an alternative is “something we’re really trying to promote in California,” he says.

“There are a number of golf courses that are using recycled water to irrigate, and that’s not covered,” he says. “We really do recognize the great strides that golf courses have gone through.”

The resolution puts those superintendents in a tough situation, since past efforts to bring golf courses and water districts together have delivered promising results.

Regardless of how those programs are implemented, golf courses and water task forces like the ones Kessler has helped build will continue to push for plans with lighter restrictions for golf.
 

From the feed

Large enough to fit a soccer ball. Three-and-a-half times the size of a regulation golf hole. Pink. The days of 4.25-inch painted white cups aren’t over. But summer is tournament — and experimentation – time. Golf courses are using the season to unveil a different layer. Superintendents and their crews received the assignment of cutting and painting the cups. Twitter provided a forum to announce the twist.

Matt Dutkiewicz @Matty_Duck_75
Lots of compliments on the pink cup inserts during the Women’s City Championship, next yr will have to paint pink as well

Kevin Hicks @golfsuper1992
And so the era of the 15” cup begins at Couer d’Alene Resort. Promo shoot today for the Big Cup Open Aug 3 kickoff.

Josiah Rokey @RokeyJ
Someone’s going to have a surprise on #6 green. #15”cup #golf @GCImagazine.

Jarrod Barakett1 @barakett1
8” cups come to London golf market at Crumlin Creek, London’s 1’st 12 hole golf course!!!

Cowboys Golf Club @Cowboys Golf Club
Today is the day we make history. Come be a part of it. 15 inch cups on all 18 holes! #readygolf #golf @EagleGolf

Join the conversation on Twitter @GCIMagazine!

Listen to superintendents’ stories of dealing with water restrictions on the Superintendent Radio Network by entering http://bit.ly/WCcrisis in your browser.