Maintaining balance

When you spend more than two decades maintaining the same grounds, the real highlights and challenges tend to shuffle toward the middle. You remember only the greatest and the worst days.

After 22 years at Greensboro Country Club, which features a pair of courses on separate central North Carolina sites, Doug Lowe is quick to recall not his most enormous success but his most trying days. “There was one major accomplishment,” Lowe says about the 2008-09 Donald Steel renovation of the Ellis Maples-designed Farm Course, about 10 miles northwest of downtown Greensboro. “It was basically like doing a new golf course, all new irrigation, drainage, cart paths, greens, all new features, regrassed the entire property. I don’t remember taking very many days off that year. I just lost a year of my life, but it was well worth it. That was a nice accomplishment.” But Lowe talks longer about what happened on that course almost a decade later, during the worst winter weather of his career.

“We had a period of about 10 days where it never got much above freezing, and it got down into single digits,” he says. The Farm Course greens had been swapped earlier that year from bentgrass to ultradwarf Bermudagrass and were still fragile. Lowe covered them, but those covers didn’t prove effective. Who knows how more mature greens would have reacted, he says, but this was close to disaster. New greens, withering. Every one of them needed to be resprigged. “We had one green that we were having problems with, and we pine strawed and covered it, and that green was absolutely perfect come spring. We’ve learned that once we approach single digits, pine straw doesn’t make it bulletproof but it’s definitely an added layer of insurance.”

Lowe knows the courses about as well as anybody, and not just because he has tended to them for so long as director of golf and grounds maintenance. He grew up in High Point, about 20 miles southwest of both courses, and played The Farm Course throughout his high school career. Landing tee times at the downtown Irving Park Course, a 1909 Donald Ross design, was a little more difficult.

He has been teaching some of the finer details to new superintendents Kyle Gentry, who was a second assistant for five years before heading to assistant superintendent positions at Caves Valley Golf Club outside Washington, D.C., and Pinehurst No. 2, and Martin McMillan, who moved from Salem Glen Country Club in Winston-Salem. Both started within the last year, following longtime superintendents Brooks Turner, now at Starmount Forest Country Club in Greensboro, and Wes Proctor, now with Davey Tree. Turner and Proctor had both worked at the club for more than 20 years and “just were phenomenal,” Lowe says.

Chemistry and plant protectants are among those finer points, and they tend to be “more of a feel thing,” Lowe says. SePRO’s Cutless MEC and Legacy plant growth regulators are in regular rotation.

“We’ll use Legacy in the spring and in the fall, and then we’ll switch to Cutless on the bentgrass in the summer months,” he says. “I use Cutless at my Irving Park Course on my bentgrass in the summer months. It seems to be much safer versus maintaining some type of straightforward program. I don’t get the weird growth effects or the yellowing.”

At The Farm Course, which has not experienced another stretch as extreme as the 2017-18 winter since those 10 freezing days, Lowe uses both products on Zeon Zoysiagrass. “I don’t get the bronzing that I get from straight applications” of other products. “Legacy is a good product for us, and it’s a good mix ratio. If we go out with straight Legacy, a lot of times we’ll bump up and add straight Cutless MEC to that tank mix depending on what we’re looking for. Sometimes, if we have a big tournament, we’ll go out with straight Cutless.

“We see a little bit of yellowing. The Zeon Zoysiagrass is already a lime green — it doesn’t have that deep dark green that some of the grasses do, it just naturally wants to go a little yellow on you — so we spend a little extra money on the Cutless to basically maintain better aesthetics.” And better aesthetics help every day be at least a little more memorable.