Open season

Outside the ropes at Pinehurst Resort, everything is a zoo.

Sod installers and asphalt pavers are working around grandstand builders and so many vendors. Dozens of maintenance team members are shuffling between the resort’s 11 courses and 189 holes. This is what happens ahead of the 124th U.S. Open — and the fourth at Pinehurst No. 2. “You have to be real flexible and try to prioritize needs,” No. 2 superintendent John Jeffreys says. “There’s just a ton going on right now.”

Inside the ropes, though? “We couldn’t be better,” Jeffreys says.

A warm spring helped Jeffreys and his team avoid a late frost, which allowed them to start tournament prep a little earlier. Some timely rainfall roused much of the course to life out of winter. The resort also opened a new golf course — the Tom Doak-designed Pinehurst No. 10 welcomed its first foursomes on April 3, just 69 days before the start of the U.S. Open — but not even that could slow the team. Those 69 days represented a world of breathing room compared to 2014, when the resort acquired National Golf Club, now called Pinehurst No. 9, about two weeks before the start of hosting the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open in consecutive weeks. “We can’t make it easy,” Jeffreys says with a laugh. “We got to throw some kind of curveball in there.”

Jeffreys has read every curveball perfectly, in part by increasing his work hours to about 80 per week starting in late April to attend to every cranny on No. 2. Like most golf course superintendents, he has focused plenty on greens — and specifically on firmness. They need to be a little faster for the pros.

“Firmness is not something we manage for daily play, but it is something we do for championships,” Jeffreys says. “Turf and plant health and moisture levels are what dictate firmness, and we’re not going to try to get them overly firm for normal play — we’ll get ’em fast — but if moisture is the biggest contributing factor to firmness, we’re just looking at keeping the grass healthy 99 percent of the time. Championship week is when we drive down and get ’em really firm.”

And during this dawning era of big data, Jeffreys does have a firmness number in mind. “It will probably be around 330 or 340,” he says, quickly adding, “Now, that doesn’t mean anything to anybody who doesn’t have a GS3, but it is significantly firmer than what we normally maintain.”

Jeffreys introduced the USGA’s GS3 smart golf ball on No. 2 last year. With over 15,000 data points, the tiny tech measures speed, trueness, smoothness and, yes, firmness, all with a few Stimpmeter rolls per green. Assistant superintendents Eric Mabie, David Chrobak and Andrea Salzman normally incorporate the job into the rest of their normal rounds around the course, with the data uploaded to and stored on the USGA’s DEACON cloud platform. Jeffreys checks the numbers every day on a cell phone app.

“It gives you some data that you can look back on that tells you what occurs when you perform certain cultural practices, whether it be mowing, vertical mowing, topdressing, venting, rolling,” Jeffreys says. “Every time you use it, you gain data that you can look back on and retrieve when you need to do something to get to a certain benchmark. So now that we know what our target is for Monday, we know what we need to do looking back on previous practices that got us there. Part of that is the GS3 itself and part of that is the DEACON platform to keep all that information for us.”

The firmness of the greens on No. 2 normally measures around 380 or 390. Again, Jeffreys says, “that doesn’t mean anything to you, and going to 330 may not sound like a big difference.” Bermudagrass, he notes, plays firmer, around 290. “It’s just a matter of how you get there and what you do to get it.

“You’re not going to take a green that hasn’t been maintained properly and get it firm by just topdressing this week,” Jeffreys adds. “There’s a program approach to it over years. You try to dilute organic matter, schedule aerification programs, all that. Using the GS3 can help you manage year-in year-out, so when you have a championship you’ll know what to do.”

Jeffreys has also been talking even more than normal with Darin Bevard, the director of championship agronomy for the USGA Green Section. Outside of tournament prep periods, the two talk voice to voice about every other week — often more about fishing than about golf — with far more frequent texts. “Whenever he has a question or whenever I have a question, there’s some sort of communication,” Bevard says.

Their conversations haven’t changed much since the GS3 rolled onto No. 2, “other than the fact we get feedback about what he’s seeing and the functionality of the ball,” Bevard says. “The biggest thing about our conversations now is that, unlike when we had the (FieldScout) TruFirm (firmness meter), which just the agronomists had, with them having the GS3, we’re able to communicate about what they’re seeing.”

The USGA rolled the earliest version of the GS3 at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot — which teed off that September — where Bevard described it as “clunky.” The tech returned eight months later for the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open at The Olympic Club, “and the jump in what was done during that period was incredible,” Bevard says. “The numbers validated themselves. The GS3 told me that the practice green, immediately after it was mowed and rolled, had better surface quality than it did at noon after it had been trampled by 150 golfers.”

The improvements during the last three years are even more marked.

Bevard used the GS3 at the 2023 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles — where director of golf course and grounds Justin DePippo now relies on the tech — and the 2023 Women’s Mid-Amateur at Stonewall in Elverson, Pennsylvania. And this U.S. Open will be the first men’s or women’s major to employ the most recent iteration of the smart ball.

Jeffreys realizes that plenty of turf pros still rely on feel and that everyday play might not need to be as dialed in to years of historical data as tournament and major play. He still recommends it to everybody.

“There are mom-and-pops out there that have three maintenance crew members and the guys in the grille are wondering why their greens can’t be that fast or smooth or true or firm,” Jeffreys says. “It’s hard to compare what we do for the U.S. Open to the everyday. But I do think having the tool will help people make better decisions with their resources. It’ll show that some things negatively impact the readings we’re looking for, and some things impact them positively, and it may not take as much as you thought.

“Everybody can get something out of it. How do you tell someone who has a $300,000 budget they have to spend $3,000 on this? It’s tough, but I think everybody can learn from it and they can be better at what they do.”

The GS3 might even be more beneficial for everyday play because everyday players putt more than the pros. Improve their experience on the greens and the whole round improves.

“If your greens are bad, it doesn’t matter how good your tees and fairways are, and if your greens are good, it doesn’t matter how bad your tees and fairways are,” Jeffreys says. “Greens are where it’s at.”

And this month, with television cameras, round-the-clock attention and the eyes of the professional golf world at Pinehurst No. 2. Jeffreys and his team are ready. The course is ready. The greens are definitely ready.

“As soon as somebody makes that putt on 18 on Sunday, it’s over,” Jeffreys says. “Construction is a crescendo, you’re building to something. This is what we’ve all ramped up to.”