2023 Numbers to Know: The stories

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Numbers to Know 2023

Happy New Year from all of us at Nufarm! To say that we are living in interesting times is an understatement. Arguably, golf course management has never been more dynamic. Knowledge is key to navigating challenging times, and we hope that supporting the State of the Industry survey is of benefit to you. We are honored to stand with you throughout all the volatility and uncertainty and to offer innovative solutions to meet your needs.

Joining Nufarm in 2022, I had the opportunity to visit current Nufarm customers, hear from them on the year’s challenges and work collaboratively in the preparation and planning for 2023. Meeting with superintendents and club leadership day in and day out showed me the importance Nufarm has in providing trusted fungicide solutions from Tourney and Traction to Pinpoint and 3336. Nufarm herbicides Sure Power, Millennium Ultra 2 and Cheetah Pro continue to provide pristine conditions to golf courses across the country. And demand for Nufarm’s Anuew Plant Growth Regulator as a premium surface conditioner for tournament-ready turfgrass has never been stronger.

Beyond our current portfolio, I have seen first-hand the new technologies and chemistries being developed by Nufarm’s research and development to meet disease and weed pressures superintendents face. Nufarm’s ongoing trial work with university partners and golf course superintendents continue to yield performance data that informs our development pipeline of solutions.

Through Nufarm’s relationship with the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, the 2022 EXCEL Nufarm Leadership Program allowed me to meet with future leaders of clubs throughout the country to share the challenges and opportunities we are facing to guide our focus and course into 2023. Through the local Golf Course Superintendents Association chapters, my Nufarm colleagues actively spend time with superintendents and support them throughout the season. These relationships help golf courses and the golf industry meet the challenges of tomorrow with Nufarm solutions and innovations.

Connecting all of these efforts is Nufarm’s commitment to our customers. With over 100 years of growth, Nufarm’s success is tied to your success as we work together to adapt to current challenges and develop solutions for tomorrow’s successes.

I look forward to all we will accomplish together in 2023!

Chris Fronczek

Golf Market Manager

How is it all getting done?

Welcome to our annual celebration of the brilliance of golf course superintendents and their teams.

Readers with fabulous memories will recall that two years ago we detailed the nuances of the sudden golf surge following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Readers with good memories will remember that last year we explored who works on a golf course and how those individuals elevated industry finances despite immense challenges.

For this year’s “Numbers to Know” section, we went to work on combining data with superintendent anecdotes to describe how golf course maintenance work is being executed amid record play. We hope you find a few ideas to help handle the activity on your course. We’re also hoping the following pages reach the hands and inboxes of golfers. The more customers and members know about golf course maintenance, the more your extraordinary efforts will be appreciated throughout the non-turf sectors of the golf community. We encourage readers to use our content in communication and outreach efforts with stakeholders at their respective courses and beyond.

What type of work did it take to produce this section?

We collaborated with Signet Research, a New Jersey-based independent research company, to distribute a 31-question survey to an email list of 9,483 print and/or digital subscribers who are superintendents, directors of agronomy or assistant superintendents. Results are based on 369 responses with a +/- 5.1 percent margin of error.

In addition to the survey, editor-in-chief Guy Cipriano and managing editor Matt LaWell conducted phone interviews with superintendents across the United States to pair human stories with the data.

An annual donation to the Wee One Foundation, a charitable organization established in 2004 in memory of Wayne Otto, CGCS, that helps superintendents and other turf professional in need, is made in thanks for survey participation.

Scaling for the times

More residents, home construction and golf are altering turf life at a mega-development with 117 holes.

Crews leave six maintenance facilities a few minutes before 7 a.m. on an early November morning to begin preparing six Georgia golf courses for more than 500 expected rounds. The dreamy trifecta of golf, gated neighborhoods and the great outdoors continue to move warm-weather real estate in post-pandemic America. Reynolds Lake Oconee, a 117-hole, nearly 10,000-acre bubble 85 miles southeast of Atlanta, has experienced a windfall due to recent population and lifestyle shifts.

Lane Singleton rises from his desk around 9:30 a.m. — Singleton relishes outdoor activity, but his job as the development’s vice president of agronomy requires morning, afternoon and sometimes evening office hours — and points to a vertical, poster-sized map of the property. A Reynolds Lake Oconee employee since 2000 and its lead turf professional since 2012, Singleton orients a visitor to the property’s past, present and future before scurrying to a meeting in his pickup.

Here's what the visitor gleans from an hour with Singleton, a two-hour driving tour with Great Waters superintendent Brandon Hayes and a two-hour walk through the epicenter of the development: Reynolds Lake Oconee represents a large-scale example of how the golf and real estate surges affect turf teams in the Sun Belt.

The development debuted in 1988 as a family-owned entity. The first two golf courses opened in the 1980s. The Reynolds family added a Jack Nicklaus design, Great Waters, in 1992. Development accelerated from 1997 to 2007, with the addition of 81 holes. Any astute industry observer knows what happened next: golf and real estate became a vulnerable mix during the Great Recession. Fortunately, a giant company, MetLife, purchased the development in 2012, an event Singleton calls a “godsend.”

Singleton is reminded of the history every time he completes monthly reports to send up the MetLife ladder or drives around the community. He still loves golf, turf and interacting with the crew, so he tries to visit at least half of the six courses daily. Each course has a superintendent. Watching teams frantically work around play reaffirm the reality of the numbers he sends to corporate.

Reynolds Lake Oconee supported 135,000 rounds in 2019, according to Singleton. The total increased to 154,000 in 2020 despite single-rider carts and other pandemic-created restrictions, plus extended course closures following a tornado. The current golf story started emerging in 2021, as the six courses hosted 192,000 rounds. Reynolds Lake Oconee then pushed 200,000 rounds in 2022.

“It’s not just a COVID thing anymore,” Singleton says. “We need the labor to be there and we need to continue to strengthen our cultural and agronomic programs around our play. If we don’t have that, we will literally sink. The golf courses need to be strong enough to accommodate that much play.”

The peak-season team Singleton oversees included around 150 employees in 2022, although he adds “we would love to have around 200.” Singleton views his team as seven units. A crew led by director of horticulture Kevin O’Shea maintains the grounds of the Ritz-Carlton hotel on property and amenity areas. Reynolds Lake Oconee’s primary business is real estate. Golf course maintenance becomes trickier when lot sales are robust. A strong construction market shrinks the labor pool. Contractors are omnipresent across the development as trucks enter, leave and reenter the gates throughout the day.

“We’re a real estate development company,” Singleton says. “If we’re not selling dirt, it’s not a good thing. When the housing industry is as positive as it is, and construction is as positive as it is, and landscaping is equally as good, we’re directly competing with that workforce.”

In normal circumstances, the three-county area, which has a combined population below 65,000, struggles to produce enough labor to support a community with 3,200 upscale homes. Boosting compensation helped fill more golf course maintenance positions in 2022 than 2021, and Singleton is optimistic about labor in 2023.

Career advancement opportunities help retain dedicated and talented turf employees. Singleton started as an assistant superintendent at The Landing. Hayes started at Great Waters as the second assistant in 2007 and he’s entering his 10th season as head superintendent. Singleton establishes budgets and helps plot agronomic programs, but he gives superintendents and their teams autonomy to maintain their respective courses as they deem fit

Each course closes for three weeks in the summer and one in the winter for invasive tasks such as aerification, drainage enhancements, cart path repairs, and tree work. Veterans such as Singleton and Hayes can remember a time when aerifications were squeezed into one-day closures.

“Those three weeks in the summertime help us open back up with a much better product,” Hayes says. “It’s slower – but not slow – in the middle of the summer when it’s hot there.”

Singleton recently devised a 10-year plan for course improvements. Nothing in the plan indicates the pace will significantly slow.

“We’re headed in a very positive direction,” he says, “and we’re having to make decisions now for the next three to five years. I like where we are now. I think we can do a better job in a couple different areas and we are going to do that. But we had a pretty darn good 2022 and we’re looking forward to what tomorrow brings.” – Guy Cipriano

Regular maintenance days at a muni?

A few Mondays without golfers gives a small Texas team a chance to complete tasks around the golf growth in a bustling Texas city.

Forest Creek Golf Club is a bit of a unicorn, even during these recent heady years for the sport. Situated in Round Rock, Texas, about 25 miles north of downtown Austin, the club now carries a waiting list for annual passes. Plenty of clubs have similar waiting lists, sure, except Forest Creek is a municipal track, packed from the first tee times shortly after 7 a.m. through the end of just about every day — about 53,000 rounds this year after almost 60,000 last year.

“We slowed down just a hair, but not much,” says superintendent Will Bell, who recently completed his sixth season at the course. “We’re still rocking and rolling pretty good, and we’ve beat our budget every year in terms of rounds and revenue. Putting our best foot forward, for sure.”

Bell’s list of challenges over the last year or two is considerable and not too dissimilar from that of plenty of other superintendents: His nine-person crew, which includes assistant superintendent Jeremy Zabierek and mechanic Mike Barrett, is about 20 percent smaller than it should be and almost nobody new to the club has any turf maintenance experience. The labor situation is the worst he has seen in his two decades in the industry.

KemperSports has managed Forest Creek since December 2016, the same month Bell started at the club. Bell is in “close contact” with KemperSports operations vice president Val D’Souza and meets weekly with Round Rock sports facilities and operations manager Brian Stillman. The team worked through a $5.2 million course renovation in 2018 highlighted by new greens and a new irrigation system, with plenty of annual projects during the years since then.

This past season, Bell says, “We renovated 6 tee box, we did a lot of curbing along the cart paths — they’re about six feet wide and they should be eight — and we kept up on our tree removal. We spent a lot of money on tree removal and clearing, raising canopies. We wanted to get these creeks exposed that were hidden because of overgrowth. We are Forest Creek, after all.”

How do all those projects reach the finish line with an undersized crew filled with folks who might still be learning on the job?

“It’s challenging, no doubt,” Bell says. Both the city and KemperSports have “really been supportive with what I need. Lately, we’ve closed every other Monday to give us a ‘maintenance day,’ which has been super helpful as far as our aerification, verticutting, topdressing, things like that, plus it gives the course a break. Brian (Stillman) told me, ‘We don’t want to overuse the golf course. If it needs a break, let’s give it a break,’ and I couldn’t be more appreciative of that.

“A lot of people get every Monday, but we’re a municipal, and I think this is the first municipal I’ve heard of that’s been closed every other Monday even. It’s been really helpful.”

Working around play is sometimes necessary, too. Maintenance normally starts at 5:30 a.m. but there have been some 4 and 4:30 starts. Bell has been out on the course as late as 9 p.m. Golfers in search of an annual pass aren’t the only ones waiting.

— Matt LaWell

36 holes, 33 years

The headaches and joys of working around bunker reconstruction highlighted Curt Brisco’s year.

There are plenty of days when Curt Brisco has no idea how he and his team of — at most — 14 complete every job across the 36 holes of Fox Prairie and Forest Parks golf courses in Noblesville, Indiana. Muscle memory probably plays a big part, at least for Brisco. He started working on the municipal courses 33 years ago and has been the superintendent overseeing maintenance on both for the last 21 years.

“The first four or five years, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, just trying to figure out how to do 36,” Brisco says. “It takes a while, but once you get comfortable with it and you know the day-to-day, you kind of know what to expect. ‘OK, if I have a shorter crew today, this is what we can do. If I have extra people, we can go do some of these other things.’ It took a while, but I feel like I know what’s going on now.

“You have those moments but then you just kind of say, ‘We’ll do this, this and this, and we’ll get done what we can get done — get done the things that make the biggest impact and that the players will see — and maybe we’ll put off a few things that only I’ll see or my assistant, Sam Wyant, will see. You work for the player and then do your pet projects when you can. That’s the way I try to run things.”

The philosophy has worked for Brisco since the 1980s, when he was hired as the second assistant for Fox Prairie — which was 18 holes at the time and expanded to 27 in 2000 — before moving over to the Forest Park 9 for a decade, a position now held by Joe Silver. He could retire by now if he wanted to, he says, “but as long as my wife’s working, I might as well continue to work. I enjoy my job.”

The courses have never been busier. Brisco pays less attention to rounds count than he does to revenue, which reached a record high in 2022 for the third straight year. That financial influx helped fund a significant bunker reconstruction project that saw Better Billy Bunker and Verde Sports Construction working on 18 of Fox Prairie’s 27 holes from Labor Day eve to the Monday before Thanksgiving. The courses endured a three-week mini drought during the project, which wrapped just as temperatures started to drop. Even with nine holes closed most days, the course still notched record months.

“We were able to keep 18 holes open at all times,” Brisco says. “The construction crew was great. They didn’t even ask to close any of the holes while they were working, which I found shocking, but they did. They worked right through it. Unless they were spraying and needed to close the 9 they were working on, we were open the whole time.”

Busy in late September and early October is not the same as busy in June, July and August, Brisco says — plus the grass slows down a little bit. “You have a little more time to breathe and get the course work done,” he says. “We just worked our way through it.”

No hitting the brakes

Gone are prolonged stretches when on-course activity decelerates in southwest Florida.

Dan Brooks started his job at Panther Run Golf Club in late 2018.

Back then, which wasn’t that long ago, a busy peak-season day included 150 rounds. A busy off-season day included 75 to 100 rounds.

As Brooks enters his fourth full year at the semi-private southwest Florida facility, he’s preparing a 126-acre course for play numbers he never imagined. Busy peak-season days approach 250 rounds, a total Brooks calls “insane.” Even on stifling summer days, Panther Run can host more than 150 rounds, a number Brooks calls “crazy.”

Stats and adjectives don’t fully describe how the surge has changed life for the Panther Run team. The 17-worker crew begins days earlier and works faster as development surrounding the course continues to grow … and grow … and grow.

The crew reports at 5:30 a.m. and frantic work begins at 6. All 18 holes are mowed, raked and groomed by 10.

“It’s all hands on deck,” Brooks says. “Every single person, including myself and our assistant, are on a mower, changing cups or doing course setup. We pretty much get everything set up for play ahead of lunchtime.”

It’s impossible to track labor hours, tweak agronomic programs, update budgets and communicate with stakeholders while operating a mower. Working alongside the crew during the morning rush pushes administrative tasks to afternoons. “When the crew gets out of here, we will come in and do our office work,” Brooks says. “We’ll stay two, three, four hours extra every day to get done what we need to accomplish.”

Groups teeing off at 7:30 alternate depending on the day — seniors on Mondays, ladies on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and men on Thursdays. Tee sheets packed with leagues, members and daily-fee play will continue in 2023 and likely beyond. “I don’t see an end in sight to be honest with you,” Brooks says. “That’s a good thing because that means golf is growing, and that’s what we want.”

The business growth led to Panther Run obtaining funds to re-grass fairways with Bimini Bermudagrass and add Capillary Concrete to bunkers. The course opened in 2007 and explosive southwest Florida weather combined with year-round play quickly ages infrastructure. Improved fairway turf limits damage and wear caused by heavy cart traffic. A modern bunker liner system reduces angst following violent storms. The play spike, Brooks says, helped him sell the enhancements to his bosses.

A desire to amplify Panther Run’s topdressing program to limit wear caused by more tires and steps on turf convinced Brooks to increase the sand line-item in recent budgets. But that money has been used to cover rising plant protectant, fertilizer and fuel costs.

Play seemingly never stops in southwest Florida. But all budgets have defined endpoints.

“I’m super proud of the crew we have,” Brooks says. “They come out here every day and put their blood, sweat and tears into this place, and the golf course is really shining even with all the play. With everything that we are doing, the place is awesome.”

— Guy Cipriano

An important ally

Completing tasks ahead of play becomes possible when you get along with the person running the tee sheet.

An important co-worker understands the hustle superintendent Kelly Eilers and the Brandon Golf Course turf team face when preparing the 18-hole course for play. That co-worker, Andrew Bauer, doubles as the South Dakota municipal facility’s general manager and golf professional.

With support from Bauer, Eilers’s team receives 45 minutes of solitude to groom the 140-acre course before the first tee time. When play begins, golfers are only starting on the first tee. The earliest a golfer might reach the back nine is around 8:30 a.m.

$18 per hour?

West Coast rates are always higher. How high can entry-level pay climb?

Depending on where they work across the state, hourly employees in Oregon are paid one of three different minimum wages. Not that those figures — $14.75 per hour within urban growth boundaries in the Portland metro area, $13.50 for most of the western half of the state, and $12.50 in non-urban counties — matter much to Brian Koffler.

“Last summer, we moved our entry-level wage to $18 an hour,” says Koffler, now in his 12th year as the superintendent at Waverley Country Club in Portland. “And we still couldn’t find anybody. We just couldn’t find people.”

Waverley, which will host the 2023 U.S. Senior Women’s Open Championship in August, has counted about 20 crew members for club championship week the last handful of years. This past summer, that number was 11. “We’ve really struggled in an urban area to find an adequate number of seasonal folks” — especially high school and college students, Koffler says. He turned more to rural areas around the city and “had a lot of luck with teachers as of late, but it’s their summer and they don’t want to work 40-hour weeks.” Another club across town bumped its entry pay rate to $20 per hour, “and had, arguably, a lot more success.”

Twenty dollars per hour for no prior golf course experience? Could that be the future for the West Coast and, eventually, other cities and urban areas across the country? Perhaps.

“The club recognizes that we need to bump that entry-level wage up to be more competitive in the marketplace,” says Koffler, who notes that part of the escalating pay challenge is properly forecasting what to pay people the next summer when drafting fiscal year budgets the prior June. “It’s my job to communicate those things more rapidly on the fly. ‘We need more resources.’ Unfortunately, a lot of superintendents just say, ‘This is what I asked for and it’s what I’m going to make work.’ And you’re hesitant to go back to the well.

“I feel better about the resources we’re working with this year, that’s for sure.”

Even shorthanded for much of the season, Koffler and the crew managed to rebuild the driving range tee — all grass — for the first time in almost 20 years and will button up a few small projects before the tournament next fall. After a significant course upgrade in 2011-12, the board is “realizing that if you don’t continually invest in the golf course, then you’re going to fall further and further behind to those who are,” Koffler says. “They’re ready to reinvest some capital dollars in the golf course.”

Good news for a club about to host its eighth USGA championship in eight different decades — previous highlights include the 1970 U.S. Amateur won by Lanny Wadkins, the 1981 U.S. Women’s Amateur won by Juli Inkster, and the 1993 U.S. Junior Amateur won by Tiger Woods. Now about filling seasonal staff positions for the event.

— Matt LaWell

Scaling up

More of nearly everything, including labor, allows a private club in a fast-growing market to keep pace with frantic activity.

Nate Maurer leads a team providing a product for a hot industry inside the boundaries of a hot housing market in a hot climate.

Maurer is the director of agronomy at Jacksonville Golf and Country Club in Jacksonville, Florida. The club’s annual round numbers hovered in the mid-20,000s until the surge of 2020. With more than 50,000 new residents living in the Jacksonville metropolitan area since 2019 and more existing residents sticking around the entire year, the club now regularly supports around 35,000 annual rounds. A Duval County noise ordinance prohibiting outdoor equipment operation before 7 a.m. makes handling the sudden play spike on the 100-acre course especially tricky.

Fortunately, the club had the foresight to add five golf course maintenance employees beginning in late 2020 and extending into early 2021.

“We can get it done with eight guys or we can get it done with 22,” says Maurer, the club’s superintendent since 2016. “It’s just about getting to that level of intensity and that level of detail. We had to look at a way to accommodate extra play and get things done on the golf course.”

The club worked with a local staffing company to find the additional labor.

“That has been extremely helpful to give us some reliable staffing,” Maurer adds. “It’s still unreliable in the greater outlook here. I don’t think we would be able to accomplish or do what we do without the help of those guys.”

The extra bodies soften the wear on a 34-year-old course with original species and varieties, including 23 acres of Tifway 419 Bermudagrass fairways. Jacksonville Golf and Country Club sits inside a community with more than 900 homes. Personal carts on fairways are a common sight. Tactics to minimize turf wear and stress caused by increased traffic include:

• Transitioning turf on traffic sides of holes to Celebration Bermudagrass
• Raising tree canopies
• Devising and implementing cart exit and entrance strategies
• Adding limestone screenings under tree canopies
• Recalculating fertilizer applications

The club also added a second fairway aerification in 2022. An eight-day closure in mid-May and a five-day closure in July for aerifications and other aggressive cultural practices are on the 2023 calendar. “They are everything for us to have grass on the ground in January and February,” Maurer says. “The objective is to have year-round turf for the mild disruption of 13 days.”

Like his peers, Maurer notices more unrepaired ball marks, unfilled divots, unraked bunkers and trash on the course. The extra labor helps tidy those messes. The club’s 74 bunkers, for example, are raked ahead of play by three or four employees. Maurer could only devote one or two workers to raking bunkers before his staff expanded.

“I don’t expect to see it slowing down for us,” he says. “Golf is taking off right now, which is great. Golf is everything down here.”

— Guy Cipriano

No fretting here

Membership is full. Play is double. How does a veteran superintendent only need small operational tweaks to satisfy a club filled with good golfers?

Jeff Whitmire’s approach to maintaining Williamsburg Golf Club hasn’t changed despite the Virginia private club filling its membership roster and jumping from 12,000 to 24,000 annual rounds in just two years.

“Truthfully, it was underutilized,” says Whitmire, the club’s superintendent since 1997. “Now, we’re at capacity. You get a little bit more wear on the golf course, you do have to pay more attention to where you direct traffic, patching divots, raking bunkers, … that kind of thing. As far as how it affects our overall workload, there’s a little bit more, but not a lot more. We were going to do the same thing whether nobody plays or we are full.”

For Whitmire and his 12-worker team, that means trying to avoid being seen or heard by golfers. His place of employment ditched the word “country” from its name and replaced it with “golf” — an emphasis on the game — following a 2009 renovation spurred by an ownership change. The pool and tennis courts went away. Expanded golf practice areas appeared. The golf-first rebranding didn’t yield instant waiting lists, but it placed Williamsburg Golf Club in a fortuitous position when golf carried private clubs at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The club possessed a reputation for satisfying low-handicappers and more golfers capable of breaking 80 started finding the club. When things are clicking, golfers making stress-free pars seldom see workers on the course.

“I’m not a big believer in having the crew out there all day during play,” he says. “I just think it’s an inefficient use of time. There’s no need trying to mow rough when you have 120 people out there and you are starting and stopping. They’re frustrated, you’re frustrated.”

Whitmire’s team stays past lunch just twice per week. They work 10 hours on Tuesdays when the club is closed; Thursday is a traditional eight-hour day. Shifts begin 30 minutes before sunrise. Equipment with lights is a key part of the operation.

Switching from walking greens mowers to triplex units further distances workers from golfers and boosts morning efficiency. Whitmire mows and rolls bentgrass greens daily using two employees. He needed four employees to walk mow the surfaces ahead of play. On days he elected to roll, Whitmire used five of his 12 workers on greens. “We improved conditions and increased labor we could use elsewhere by three,” he says. Switching to a wide rough mower creates maintenance efficiencies on the periphery of the 152-acre course.

Mowing zoysiagrass tees and grooming two acres of bunkers remain hand-centric tasks. If anything flusters Whitmire — a steady Transition Zone veteran who bypassed adding a few seasonal workers to pay full-time staff more in 2022 — it might be bunker maintenance.

“People don’t seem to want to rake bunkers anymore,” he says. “That’s probably our largest challenge.”

— Guy Cipriano