Sometimes it’s personal

A superintendent helped Cavalry Club, which owns a bucolic plot of central New York greenspace where horses once trained for war, install an irrigation system in the early 2000s. That superintendent worked long hours and embraced all aspects of the job.

Pat Carroll regularly brought his son to work. The son relished spending his childhood at a golf course. The son admits that, back then, seeing dirt and rock flipped atop vibrant turf proved jarring. How many kids truly understand golf course irrigation?

On a nearly 90-degree early September afternoon, in the middle of a year that started with a devastating freeze, Ben Carroll inspects a course with rope surrounding recently installed bluegrass-fescue sod, exposed gravel in bunkers and uncovered dirt on fairways. New friends are operating bulldozers and backhoes.

Cavalry Club doesn’t need an irrigation system upgrade, thanks to the effort Pat Carroll guided nearly 20 years ago. But the club needs new bunkers — and construction scenes aren’t as jarring anymore to the current superintendent.

“I remember being a little kid and riding around here and going, ‘What in the hell are they doing to the golf course?’” Ben says. “But the irrigation system they put in is great and my dad overdid everything. He taught me you always have two of everything. He was very well-prepared for anything to happen.”

Ben is well-prepared for anything that occurs at Cavalry Club, including working with an architect, builder and shaper. He knows the bucolic land, which features Limestone Creek flanking three sides of a property defined by a strong 57-year-old Dick Wilson and Joe Lee layout, because he was raised on the bucolic land. At just 32 years old, Ben already possesses five years as Cavalry Club’s superintendent. He succeeded his father, who held the position for almost three decades before accepting a job as grounds manager at nearby Syracuse University.

Pat achieved numerous feats at Cavalry Club, but he never received a chance to execute a bunker renovation. The project is intended to elevate maintenance logistics and aesthetics while reintroducing what Wilson and Lee crafted.

“My dad was a big part in making the course what it is now,” Ben says, “and I’m now coming in and doing everything he wanted to do but he couldn’t do while he was here. He was big on getting this project done.”

The Carrolls spend hours discussing the renovation and their respective turf jobs. Pat, who leads a crew of around 150 employees at Syracuse, occasionally visits the course, especially when it’s time to blow out the irrigation system in late fall. “He likes to drive around in a cart and bark orders on the radio,” Ben jokes. Only one employee from Pat Carroll’s final Cavalry Club crew works for Ben, although a team of consultants Pat utilized helps Ben navigate tricky situations such as the crown hydration on Poa annua greens following a rare flood-freeze event earlier this year.

Ben and his team scurried to get the greens into playing shape for spring play. The bunker renovation commenced in August. A demanding year? Sure. But Ben still exudes the energy of a kid driving around the course with his father.

“This is my home,” he says. “I don’t have kids. I’m getting married next year. I haven’t had a day off in a couple of months. I spend about 14 hours a day here and it gets daunting at times, but I’m happy to be here. I’m really happy the project is turning out this way. I love it here. It’s my heart and soul. I have my fiancé, my dog and this.”

Neither central New York nor Cavalry Club are David Ferris’s home — not anymore. Ferris relocated to South Florida decades ago. The lower part of the Sunshine State is a good place for a golf course architect to build a career. Ferris and his partner, John Sanford, don’t need to search far to find quality clients.

Some projects, though, are worth frequent multi-flight journeys. Cavalry Club is one of those projects. Ferris also exudes the joy of a Cavalry Club kid. His father, David Ferris Sr., worked as the club’s pro in the 1970s. Some of Ferris’s earliest golf memories involve chilling with his father in the pro shop. Ferris spent his childhood in the Syracuse area. He then earned three degrees at a pair of central New York universities, SUNY Morrisville and Cornell, and developed into a well-traveled architect making the game his family loves better.

Ferris had been eyeing an opportunity to help the club since playing the course with his father in the early 2000s. Cavalry Club represents a central New York anomaly: a Wilson/Lee design in the middle of Robert Trent Jones Sr. country. Jones, who learned the game in nearby Rochester, designed or renovated 68 courses in the state, according to a project list on the Robert Trent Jones Society website. When Cavalry Club added golf in the 1960s, the selection of Wilson, Jones’s fiercest rival, proved curious. Wilson died on July 5, 1965, nine days after Cavalry Club debuted its course. The club boasts the lone Wilson/Lee design in the region.

The club hired Ferris in 2021 to concoct a plan to not only renovate bunkers, but to reintroduce short grass around greens, restore fairway cuts and width in landing areas, assist with tree clearing, renovate tees, add native fescue areas, improve drainage, and elevate practice areas.

“I never thought I’d get a project like this,” he says. “I kept hoping. I have interviewed for multiple projects up there before, but a couple of them never came to fruition. You don’t see a lot of renovation work in that area. And if they do renovation work, a lot of times they will do it in-house.”

Work will be executed in phases. The current phase involves renovating 74 bunkers, placing 115,000 square feet of new sod around those bunkers and adding 7,400 square feet of short grass. George E. Ley Company and New York resident Kevin Wager are the builder and shaper. Hundreds of trees have been removed over the past two years, including some maples Ben Carroll says he helped his father plant.

The square footage of bunker sand will decrease from 83,000 to 54,000. Ferris is restoring jagged bunker edges and free-form shapes found in a 1966 aerial guiding the plan.

Visits are rekindling various stages of Ferris’s life. He recently noticed a copy of his golf course architecture book “No Risk, No Reward” in the Manlius Library. One of the librarians grew up five houses from him.

“Everywhere I go in the town is like a flashback,” he says. “I wrote a book and now that book is in the library, and it sits in what was my kindergarten at one point. It’s so cool. The little ice cream place, the Little League field … that’s all the same. My family is still there. I’ll play golf with my brother when I’m in town. I can’t escape it.”

On a late-summer site visit, Ferris bumped into Bob McCarthy, who followed David Ferris Sr. as the club’s head pro. The architect asked McCarthy for his feedback on the completed work. “He said, ‘Looking pretty good.’ I said, ‘Not bad for somebody who used to run around the pro shop in diapers.”

Somebody who used to run around the course in diapers has similar thoughts about the results.

“Being around this course for so many years, I’ll drive around, or I look down another hole, and I feel like I’m now at a different course because of what we are doing,” Ben Carroll says. “It’s really neat.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s editor-in-chief.