Ready for double liftoff

Huber is the director of agronomy at The Club at Carlton Woods in the city’s north suburbs. A Penn State graduate, Huber has been at the club since 2010 and the director of agronomy since December 2018.

Huber and his team guided the club’s turf preparations for the Chevron Championship, the LPGA Tour’s signature event, played at Carlton Woods’s Jack Nicklaus Signature Course this month.

The event marked the beginning of a 10-year contract between Carlton Woods and the LPGA.

Immediately following the tournament, the Nicklaus Signature Course, which opened in 2001, closed for a major renovation that includes refurbishing the greens and bunkers and the installation of a new irrigation system.

The estimated price tag? Not quite $8 million, including $3 million for the irrigation system. The timeline? The club hopes to have the Nicklaus Course ready for member play by Oct. 20.

In the meantime, regular play (the club hosts approximately 38,000 rounds each year) has shifted to the club’s Tom Fazio Championship Course, which debuted in 2005.

So why was a major renovation scheduled as the club was preparing to host its first Chevron Championship? The impetus came in part from Nicklaus, who visits the club each May.

“We’ve solicited feedback from him over the years,” Huber says. “What his thoughts are, what he sees, and a lot of it was just the comment that, ‘The course was getting tired.’ And to keep up with the demand of a high-end facility and our peers, we should think about doing a project.”

Thus, the renovation was scheduled for the spring, summer and early fall of 2023.

Chris Cochran, a senior designer for Nicklaus Design, will be heavily involved in the project.

“The golf course was very well-built the first time,” he says. “It’s one of my favorites that Jack has done.

“I can’t think of any fairway grading we need to do. Just a little bit of tee work. So, it’s mostly just kind of rebuilding the pieces that are already there.”

Cochran spoke to the quality of the course’s greens, which are being restored to their original size.

“The greens are nice,” he says. “There’s no complaints about pin area or pitch or anything like that, so we’ll just put them back the way they were. As far as the bunkers go, they’re beautifully done. We’ll do a little bit more work to keep the surface water out of them, so they don’t wash as bad. But it’s actually a pretty simple job by my standards.”

But first there was the Chevron Championship, which moved to Carlton Woods after 54 years at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, where, for most of its history it was known as the Dinah Shore or Nabisco Championship. Chevron became the title sponsor last year.

The competitive environment the LPGA Tour players experienced in south Texas in April differed from what they were accustomed to in Southern California in late March and early April, the tournament’s traditional window.

The Nicklaus Course at Carlton Woods features Bermudagrass throughout its layout, including TifEagle greens. Huber notes that the notoriously fickle south Texas weather in April factored into his preparations.

“Houston has unpredictable weather,” he says. “In April, we should be good as far as temperatures, but you never know with the rain and overcast skies, and we didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do for our membership for us to overseed the golf course. We don’t want a harsh transition period after the overseed checks out and we’re stuck with this piqued Bermudagrass.

“We decided we’re not going to overseed for the event. We’re going to try and push the Bermudagrass early and that’s a tough thing to do between March 15 and advance week, (the week of April 10), so we had about a month. That’s really our window to try and grow some (419) Bermudagrass, and get the rough a little bit thicker, get the fairways to a little more dense.

“The greens are probably the easiest part of it, but it’s really the rough and the fairways. (The greens) have various types of Bermuda. They’re not pure TifEagle, which is what we’re after when we’re through with this renovation.”

Heath Wisdom is the superintendent in charge of the Nicklaus Signature Course on a daily basis. Wisdom, who has an associate’s degree from Western Texas College, has been at Carlton Woods for a year and a half. He oversees a team of two dozen employees.

“The trick really for me is keeping up with the demands of daily member play in the middle of all this,” he says. “That’s probably the biggest hurdle for me. But altogether we have a great team, we have great vendors and contractors, and we all work together to produce one product.

“As far as daily member play, we do what we need to do with typical schedules and procedures. But every day something new comes up with the tournament and/or the renovation and we just fight fires and get it done.”

Like Huber, Wisdom was concerned about the south Texas weather in the weeks leading up to the tournament. “You never really know what rainfall you’re going to get,” he says. “You could get 10 inches, you could get zero.”

Wisdom is also alert to the possibility of frost in late March or early April. “It’s a slim chance, but it’s possible and would affect how the grass is two to three weeks after the frost when the tournament’s here.”

Following the conclusion of the Chevron Championship, the renovation effort proceeds full speed ahead. In some respects, it had already started. For the project to be completed by Huber’s self-imposed deadline, several pieces of a larger puzzle must fit together seamlessly. Chief among them is getting water to newly planted greens.

“That became the first problem for us to solve,” he says, “and so we came to the agreement that we could potentially start doing the mainline irrigation this winter, ahead of the LPGA event, to try to get a jump on getting some pipe in the ground, therefore alleviating that time crunch from May 1 to call it July 1. (By July 10) that irrigation system has really got to be ready to start throwing water to some of these greens. That’s just too tight a window.”

Crews have been on site since January working to install the main irrigation line, trying to get as much of the mainline pipe installed before the Chevron Championship. Huber took steps to ensure the crew had everything they needed to complete the job on time well before January.

“(A big step) was getting all the stuff, getting the irrigation heads, getting the valves, getting the valve boxes, getting the mainline pipe, selecting the contractor and working around the delays and the tight time window,” he says.

Huber’s primary concern is avoiding the supply chain issues that could jeopardize the timely completion of the project.

“In this world we’re living in, it’s not as easy to say, ‘Hey, I’ll order it,’” he adds. “It’s been a lot of ‘What’s available? When can we get it?’ and then, when they tell you, how comfortable you are with your vendor. We wanted to make sure that we had as much contracted as we possibly could eight to nine months out from the start of the project.”

As a result of all this, Huber had an extensive collection of parts and equipment on hand as dual final countdowns continue to both the Chevron Championship and the renovation.

“We’ve got reams of pipe. Contractors have got a lot of equipment on site,” he says. “We’ve got a cart barn full of boxes of irrigation heads that we’ve bought and paid for. They’ve been sitting there for a few months. They’re going to be sitting there a few months more, but we do have them, and we know we’re not going to get into that situation where we need them and can’t get them.”

Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer and senior Golf Course Industry contributor.