Laboring over labor

The COVID-19 pandemic brought forth a renewed interest in golf and recreation in general. People returned in droves to play golf and it was a welcome sight. Courses talked about rounds and play that hadn’t been seen since the 1990s.

But this pandemic brought another issue: a lack of a labor force.

With the government providing unemployment pay that rivaled what many businesses were paying, people just stayed home. This was true across the board for many service industries. To this day, these industries continue to suffer from staffing shortages. You cannot go into a restaurant and not have to wait because of those shortages, and golf courses are not immune to them either.

Before the start of COVID-19 in late 2019 and early 2020, the golf and sports turf world had already begun to see the diminished pool of applicants for seasonal and part-time positions. When I first hit a golf course in 1986 (as a cart attendant), there were young people like myself lined up to work summers and retirees looking to work year-round. The classmate who helped get me into my first job on a golf course told me I needed to apply in February or I wouldn’t get a shot.

Today, golf course superintendents and managers are faced with dwindling applications to fill key summer or year-round part-time positions. In my 2½ years at Heritage Oaks Golf Course, I was able to fill one of the five positions I was looking to fill — two of them eight-month, part-time positions and the other three summer positions. During those two-plus years, I also had, wait for it, one applicant. Yes, one.

Mowing the golf course had never been harder, and with increased play and demand, we struggled to keep it mowed. Fringe maintenance areas like bunker edging and weed eating became difficult to accomplish and we eventually ended up letting our bunker faces grow long and unkept. Our golfers accepted these changes — for the most part — but we outlined why we had to do what we did.

As we came into 2023 and I grew more entrenched as both the general manager and golf course superintendent, I felt that we needed to make the course more playable and keep play moving. The long areas around the bunkers were causing backups and just weren’t as clean a look as I wanted. I spoke to a couple friends in the business and found out that several area courses had decided to outsource their labor to outside landscape companies, which was a completely foreign concept to me at the time.

My colleagues explained that these companies would come in and provide labor to address the areas that I now had issues with, namely bunker edging and weed eating, and tee sign weed eating. While the tee sign weed eating takes minutes, the bunker work was something we could not keep up with a full-time staff of five and a part-time staff of one (a retiree in his 70s). And with me splitting duties as general manager and superintendent, it was more of a crew of 5½.

These landscape companies were charging a monthly set rate, and the courses that were using this labor option were raving about the job the companies were doing. It seemed like a great solution to a problem I was facing, but I wasn’t sure how my employer would feel about it.

I approached the director of parks and recreation with the idea of creating an RFP (a request for proposal) and put those positions out to bid to a local landscape company. After discussions with our procurement/finance department and with the city attorney about legal ramifications, I was given the green light to proceed.

We had four companies bid on the work we had outlined and, within one month, we secured a one-year contract with a local landscape company. We met with their contact and explained what we needed from them. They’d never done work on a golf course so my assistant, Bryce Miller, took them around and showed them the bunkers and tee signs and what we needed. We were still unsure how it would work, but the plan was put in place.

It has been an amazing solution to our labor issues. In just the first month, the company has been out to the course each week to do the weed eating and edging, and they are doing a great job. We alternate weeks where they weed eat one week and then come in and edge the other week. They are blowing out any debris that gets into the bunkers and everything looks great. The “clean” look has already been noted by our players and folks have said the bunkers have never looked better. 

While it may not be the solution to everyone’s labor needs, for my golf course — and maybe for many others out there — it is an alternative and an answer that may help ease some of the touch-up areas many golf course superintendents and operators have not been able to maintain since the start of COVID. It helped us deal with our laboring for labor.

Charlie Fultz is the general manager and golf course superintendent at Heritage Oaks Golf Course in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and a regular Golf Course Industry contributor.