Back to the future, part trois

What a difference another year makes here in Virginia.

When I last left Golf Course Industry readers in December 2021, I was still handling three positions with the city of Harrisonburg: interim golf course general manager, golf course superintendent and athletic fields supervisor, the last of which included overseeing the maintenance and upkeep of the city’s 10 athletic fields. It was not an uncommon theme again in 2022, but things began to change as my third year with the city wore on.

First of all, in January I got married. It was a balmy 10-degree affair with newly fallen snow as our background for pictures outside. My wife, Kim, made it an extremely memorable wedding for us both as it was a KISS-themed wedding. To my surprise, Kim came down the aisle to my favorite KISS song, Strutter. We had a video made of the wedding and two KISS songs were used as the background music (“Forever” and “Then She Kissed Me”). But there were other KISS surprises as well. Kim had special KISS cookies made for each place setting, decorated with either the logo or members’ makeup. Our guest registry were my two favorite KISS albums (“Revenge” and “Hotter than Hell”) and family and friends signed the album covers with Sharpies. We have those framed on our basement wall. So yes, it’s a KISS world and I choose to live in it — and Kim chose to join me in it. We honeymooned at an AirBnB in Key Largo for a week with beautiful weather and came back to city for the start of the year.

As I started my third year with the city some changes were in store for me. I lost my assistant superintendent shortly after our wedding. Due to the uncertainty of the general manager position with the course (if a dual role was going to be made permanent), I was unable to hire an assistant and began the year with all of five people on staff to maintain the course. Added to that issue was the current labor force woes we have all dealt with since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We couldn’t find any seasonal help for the golf course or the pro shop. Because of this issue, and as acting general manager, I instituted Maintenance Mondays, when the golf course was closed until noon. That one morning allowed us to mow all the rough and get ahead of the week’s work. It would have been impossible to maintain the course without it, and with Mondays normally being slow, it was implemented easily.

One amazing thing that came out of the first half of the year was our golf play, which was up substantially. By the end of June, we had the highest year-end revenue in the course’s 21-year history, and we turned a profit for the first time. It’s an achievement that involves the whole team at Heritage Oaks and it’s probably our biggest accomplishment since I arrived in 2020. That springboard pushed us through the season as some of the changes I really wanted finally happened.

In June, I interviewed for the newly created permanent position of general manager and golf course superintendent for Heritage Oaks and was chosen to serve. The finality of the almost two-year journey as interim GM was not lost on me, and the relief was instantly gratifying. It fulfilled a dream that I have had since getting into golf in 1992. I had always wanted to run the whole show and never thought I would have the opportunity to do so, but COVID changed all that. I always felt it was where I was supposed to be, and I crossed it off my professional to-do list.

As we rolled into the summer’s heat of July, the parks and recreation director came to me and said he had chosen an interim athletic fields manager to run the city’s fields. I couldn’t have been more ecstatic. The young man who took it over has a fields background and has already started to make some fantastic changes. I’ve only been over to the fields three or four times in the last several months, but he sure has them looking great. It was bittersweet to give the fields up as I had rebuilt two of the fields to #bluemuda and the results had been amazing. But the individual pacing needed to continue to be a GM, golf course superintendent and fields manager was just too much. I was happy to finally have that responsibility off my shoulders and into very capable hands.

As the summer wore on — an atypical mild and rainy summer for us here in the Shenandoah Valley — I was able to post the assistant superintendent position at Heritage Oaks, and in September I hired a fantastic young man named Bryce Miller to fill the position. He has already showed the desire to learn and the drive to make us better. Frankly, I need that push from him. I expect nothing but great things from Bryce as we begin to shape the future of Heritage Oaks. He has already begun taking responsibilities from me. The first big one on his plate is handling the nutrient management plan for our course with a certified nutrient management planner and working under Virginia’s BMP.

I remember a 24-year-old first-year superintendent who had a similar drive, and here he is, 28 years later, writing the end of this trilogy. He had more hair then, carried a few less pounds, and didn’t have a lick of gray in his goatee. He heads into 2023 with a much different perspective than he did in 2022, with fewer responsibilities but the same internal motor to try to make the course a little better each day. (Kaizen.) Heritage Oaks has been on a similar ride as well, and our future looks promising, much more than when it almost closed at the start of 2020.

I can’t thank Golf Course Industry enough for allowing me the space to write my drivel. Guy and Matt gave me the latitude to write what I wanted. I also want to thank those of you who read it. I hope it made for some great bathroom reading material.

I also want to thank a great friend, who we lost a few years ago, for her desire to make a writer out of me. Liz Nutter, formerly of Leading Edge Communications, was a writer and editor of several local and state trade journal magazines. She pushed me to be a better writer many years ago when I wrote for the Virginia Turfgrass Council Journal. She beat on me with her literary stick and I took my lumps. I’m far from anything close to her level, but her persistence was a driving force in my writing — and ultimately helping me win the GCSAA’s 2006 Leo Feser Award and becoming a published writer. Liz passed away in 2018 and I still think of her often. I am thankful for our friendship. I hope she would have enjoyed what I’ve written these last three years, and I know she would probably still critique the heck of me. I would expect no less from her.

Lastly, I need to thank my wife, Kim. She put up with this ridiculous schedule the last two and a half years with barely a word about it. She knows I love what I do and that I put my heart and soul into it. She too maintains a hectic schedule, as she just took a new job with a CPA firm out of New York and is finishing her associate’s degree in accounting with 15 credit hours this past semester while working a fulltime job. She’ll have her degree next spring and I’m super proud of her work. She has As across the board in all of her classes! Her schedule sounds very familiar, juggling multiple jobs at one time while being a new wife and mother. She is amazing and I’m thankful she’s in my corner now and for the start of year No. 4.

Charlie Fultz is the general manager and superintendent at Heritage Oaks Golf Course in Harrisonburg, Virginia. This is his third Turfheads Take Over story — and what he claims is the end of the trilogy.