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On Nov. 18, parts of all 50 states were covered in frost. Instead of sitting idle that morning, TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm director of golf course maintenance Stephen Britton jumped in his truck and toured the Maryland course with two assistants.

Britton drove. His assistants carried notepads and pens.

By the end of the tour, their winter to-do list had expanded to include work on wetlands, a mucky part of the course easier to tidy when the ground hardens in the winter. “I guess you could say we refurbished the winter list,” Britton says.

Whether it’s enhancing wetlands, refurbishing equipment, improving signage or renovating a bunker or tee, a weather-induced delay to your crew’s routine doesn’t need to be a setback. With proper planning, a delay helps your crew get ahead when golfers return.

“You can only clean the maintenance shop so many times, you can only sit around for so long” says Bryan Stromme, the Midwest/West regional director of agronomy for Billy Casper Golf. “The biggest thing – and most superintendents are really good at this – is not sitting around and waiting for that day and going, ‘Wow, it’s frosty. What do we do?’ It’s about having a plan so you know ahead of time and having the materials and everything ready.”

So you consider yourself a planner, but the weather stinks, you’re keeping some crew around for the winter and you’re stuck in an idea rut. Don’t fret. We’re offering 10 ways to maximize the time while waiting for the most important parts of a course to thaw or dry.
 

1. Tree time

Tree removal and pruning ranks atop nearly every list of frost-delay projects, especially in regions where golf can be played frequently throughout the winter.

“The No. 1 winter projects trending in the Southeast are pruning along wood lines,” says USGA Southeast Region agronomist Patrick O’Brien. “That’s very popular to improve turfgrass quality along wooded areas. The other thing is the use of 50- to 60-foot bucket trucks to do a lot of trimming alongside the course just to create wider corridors, improve playability and to make the hole more fun to play for the golfers.”

Billy Casper Golf manages 11 courses at the Forest Preserve in Cook County, Ill., and Stromme says superintendents and assistants will meet at one spot and work on various tree projects throughout the winter. “We are fortunate to have so many courses in the Chicago area,” Stromme says. “The guys can work together. It’s not just two guys working by themselves. It’s a crew and we can bust stuff up pretty fast.”
 

2. Knock down the native

Scraggly branches aren’t a problem at Pronghorn Club in Bend, Ore., because the majority of the 36-hole facility’s trees are small. Scraggly native areas, though, are an issue, and managing them is a poor-weather day priority for director of agronomy David Freitag.

“We have to go in and thin out sagebrush, rabbitbrush and plants like that,” Freitag says. “They get thick as the year goes on and we thin out ones near our high-play and teeing areas.” Brush-cutters and other heavy-duty mowers receive workouts throughout the country this time of year. “Even if there’s a little frost, you can get in and mow your fescue,” Stromme says. “If it’s not a heavy frost, it’s not going to hurt.”

Georgia Southern University Golf Course superintendent Patrick Reinhardt uses his student workforce to improve playing corridors. The golf course Reinhardt and his crew maintain opened last year and brush that wasn’t cleared during construction extends into potential playing areas.

“We are trying to expand our corridors more,” Reinhardt says. “We are fairly tight. Some of those areas we are going back 15, 20 feet. Chinese privet gets real invasive. It will grow right along the edge of the tree line where there’s sunlight. It’s basically one row of plants, but it ends being 15 feet wide, so we go in there and basically take out that row of plants and it opens things up.”
 

3. Woodworking

TPC Potomac’s shop often resembles a furniture warehouse during the winter. The club has 250 pieces of wooden furniture and other amenities on the course, and the entire collection is stored for the winter. Each piece is sanded and restained every winter. Using a crew of eight, the project takes six weeks.

“It’s a nice feeling when April 1 comes around and you say, ‘Let’s take everything out,’” Britton says. “You’re seeing all this brand new furniture out and it’s kind of like a nice reset button. You kind of know the season is starting when everything out there is new and fresh.”

The Tom Fazio-designed course at Pronghorn has 275 wooden rakes. In an effort to extend their usefulness, Freitag says rakes are restained each winter. Stromme says creating tee markers and building water coolers using wood from trees removed from the course are popular winter projects.
 

4. If you build it, they will grow

One of superintendent Justin Ruiz’s long-term projects at Indian Summer Golf & Country Club in Olympia, Wash., involved building a small greenhouse to grow in-house annuals. The project was completed last winter, as a mechanic spent a poor-weather week pouring the foundation and assembling a frame. The greenhouse measures 12 feet by 12 feet and growing annuals in-house could save the club $4,000 per year. This marks the first growing season since the greenhouse was installed, and if everything goes as planned, annuals should be ready to place around club grounds by the spring.

“It was something we wanted to do for a while and the mechanic had some time to do it,” Ruiz says. “It should save us money. We should have no problems growing annuals in there, but it’s also my first year to see how long it takes to grow them. It’s a smaller greenhouse, but it will be enough to get a few hundred plants in there.”
 

5. Refine a grow-in

James Stow is the superintendent at the 36-hole Ross Rogers Golf Complex in Amarillo, Texas, where frost occurs more than northerners think. “It might be a high of 30 today and then it might be 60 tomorrow,” he says. “It’s a little weird.”

The disparity means Stow uses the winter to aid the grow-in of the complex’s Mustang Course, which recently underwent more than $3 million in renovations. “We have about two-thirds of it grown-in and then we hit this time of year,” Stow says. “We kind of have to baby it through the winter, go in and reseed, and touch it up for the spring.”

Stow’s crew consists of 15 workers responsible for maintaining two golf courses. When there’s a delay, tasks involving the grow-in often take priority. “You need to plan for covers in a grow-in situation,” he says. “You need to make sure you are keeping as much turf there as you can.”
 

6. Back into bunkers

As the economy improves, many courses are embarking on full-scale bunker renovation projects. But what happens when your course or club doesn’t have the budget to renovate 50-plus bunkers? Stromme, whose company manages more than 150 courses, says trying to pick off a few aging bunkers each winter is a wise in-house practice.

“Typically you can get some of the bunkers done without damaging the turf,” he says. “It makes a lot of sense. When we do our in-house bunker renovations, we will redo the drainage, go down to the original base and clean them out. We don’t change the shape or depth. We clean all of the sand out to the clay or whatever the architect designed at the base and redo the drainage if it’s needed. We put in new pipe and gravel and comeback and put new sand in.”
 

7. Take it apart

Maintenance shops are busy places during the winter.

“There is always some type of project going on,” Ruiz says. “We’re rebuilding something, fabricating something or the mechanic is making a trailer or something like that. We have some downtime to mess around with things and we have time to wedge something in to help us next year.”

Mechanics at TPC Potomac, which receives its primary maintenance equipment via a lease, attempt to refurbish at least one piece of auxiliary equipment before the new golf season begins. Mechanics improved a 10-year-old fairway topdresser last year. “We stripped it all back, sandblasted it and repainted it,” Britton says. “We then repainted it and put on new melts and spinners. We made it like new.”

Reinhardt pairs his full-time mechanic with students during weather delays in an effort to keep the Georgia Southern Golf Course’s equipment from instantly aging. “It’s a one-year-old fleet,” he says. “We don’t want it to look 20 years old.”
 

8. Study time

Britton is completing materials required to become a Certified Golf Course Superintendent this winter. “For guys in the Northeast and East Coast, this time of year is a great opportunity,” Britton says. “It’s a lot of work. If you have a family, I don’t think you could ever get it all done during the golfing season.”

Freitag uses winter to perform safety training with employees and complete administrative tasks such as ordering uniforms and devising staffing plans. “You have things that accumulate throughout the year that aren’t the biggest priority, but you need to get them done,” he says. “You make a list of those things and start attacking them when you have the time. We make sure we can be prepared as best we can be for March so as much as possible is done when the course opens.”

Ruiz reviews standard operating procedures for the upcoming season. The reviews are designed to solidify maintenance tactics such as mowing patterns and input levels by the time a full crew arrives in the spring.
 

9. Fresh it up

The interior of the shop, the mechanics bay, locker rooms and administrative areas are among the areas of TPC Potomac’s maintenance facility that receive a fresh coat of paint each winter. Freitag uses the winter to clean the interior of Pronghorn’s pump station. Ruiz says deep cleaning equipment and organizing the shop are among his first poor-weather projects.
 

10. Move them forward

Winter might be the right time to add forward tees on your course without disturbing play. “There’s a push to get family tees out there,” Stromme says. “We will build some tee boxes farther up so it’s not just a set of tee markers in the fairway. It actually gives people a real opportunity to play in a tee box even though they are playing a shorter course.”

Guy Cipriano is GCI’s assistant editor.

What do you think?
How do you make the best use of your time when play is delayed at your course. Send us your tips to gcipriano@gie.net and we’ll share the best ones in an upcoming Fast & Firm enewsletter.