Motivated until summer's end

The finest female golfers in the world are coming to Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, on the final days of summer for the 19th playing of the Solheim Cup. The biennial matches are Sept. 13-15.

Scott Furlong and his team will be ready for them.

Furlong is Robert Trent Jones Golf Club’s superintendent. He’s worked at the club in one capacity or another for three decades and has been the head superintendent since 2000. He’s no stranger to hosting big events.

Before assuming his present position, Furlong, a former teacher and coach, worked the Presidents Cup in 1994 and 1996 when it was staged at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club. As the head superintendent, he’s hosted the Presidents Cup in 2000 and 2005, and the PGA Tour’s Quicken Loans National in 2015.

Furlong’s crew, which typically numbers 35 to 40 during the peak of the season, is spending the summer keeping the golf course primed for member play and protecting it from the Transition Zone summertime heat and humidity while simultaneously preparing it for the Solheim Cup. His maintenance practices this season remain consistent with previous seasons despite an international event on the schedule.

“We have the resources to maintain at a certain level year-round,” he says. “So, when it comes to an event like this, or other events, there’s not a lot more effort that we need to put in. Obviously, the week of the event or the advance week before, there might be some, but as far as the products we’re putting down, the labor, it’s all about the same.”

The club was named as the venue for the 2024 Solheim Cup two and a half years ago. With that event in mind, Furlong made some adjustments to this year’s maintenance schedule. “We moved some things around,” he says. “We frontloaded all the tournaments in the spring.”

Furlong also modified his aerification schedule, opting to aerify just once following Memorial Day.

“We did a little bit later aerification this year, and we did it with slightly bigger tines, knowing we’re only going to do it once,” he says. “We’re not going to do one in August. We cannot risk that so we’re only going to aerify once this year.” Furlong adds that the course will be shut down for a brief stretch when the August aeration would normally be scheduled to give the turf a rest.

As the countdown continues toward the Solheim Cup, the weather is the wild card. From mid- to late-May to mid-September, Furlong and his team must be especially wary of the Washington, D.C., area’s heat and humidity, and its effect on the course’s bentgrass greens, tees and fairways.

“We have the old 1950s Penncross still here, which still does great in the summer. It’s still got its place,” Furlong says. “We have two greens that are A-1/A-4 and we have two greens that are 007XL. Everything else, tees, fairways, greens are Penncross. They do well. They look great.”

Chase Garvey is Furlong’s senior assistant superintendent. He’s in his fourth season at the club. Garvey notes that the key to success for any Mid-Atlantic superintendent is dealing effectively with moisture-management concerns.

“Whether it is finding isolated dry spots, wilt watching or making sure we do not increase disease pressure by allowing an area to become oversaturated, our lives revolve around moisture,” Garvey says. “Our staff monitors moisture on the course throughout the day. We always strive to keep the turf as healthy as possible while ensuring we don’t interfere with the players on the course.”

Garvey adds that modern technology helps the crew keep a close and constant eye on moisture levels. “We are constantly using soil probes, POGOs and TDRs to check the moisture level of our surfaces so we can keep the turf happy and healthy.”

Robert Trent Jones Golf Club debuted a state-of-the-art Toro two-wire irrigation system in May 2023. The new system helped the team deal with drought conditions last summer and provides maximum flexibility when dealing with heat and humidity.

“If we want to make it rain, we can make it rain now,” Furlong says. “It is a juggling act. We don’t know what the summer is going to give us. No one does. It’s a changing environment every day.”

Garvey notes that no part of the property is immune to the impact of the summer weather.

“Everything is at risk,” he says. “No part of the golf course is off limits when it comes to the stress of heat and disease pressure. With this in mind, our upgraded system helps us deal with the wide range of temperatures we see here.”

Another challenge the team faces involves onsite rocks complicating the process of growing and maintaining healthy turf.

“We have so much rock underneath that it’s hard to grow grass,” Furlong says. “That’s why the new (irrigation) system is such a blessing because we can water fairways by themselves, we can water rough by itself and we can isolate because we have wall-to-wall coverage now.

“We might be in a rock cropping where you walk through the rough and you can see rocks; you can’t dig them out, we’d have to blast them out. They’re part of the playing surface in a few areas, that is the most difficult thing we deal with.”

Come the Solheim Cup, Furlong and his team will be supported by a corps of around 70 volunteers from 12 nations, many of whom worked at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club at some point in their careers. Others will come from clubs where Furlong has sent members of his team to volunteer at events.

“There are a lot of great superintendents, locally and far away, who are hosting U.S. Opens or Ryder Cups or Wells Fargos, whatever it might be,” Furlong says. “We always send them (volunteers) so it’s really cool to have those guys send people back that we’ve been supporting. They’ve also supported us.

“But it’s also the guys who have been around for a while and have some of their guys come who used to work for me a long time ago or send their staff that are basically a cookie cutter of them. And then also having the people that have worked here or gone through here as an intern come back ‘home’ for that week, that’s really exciting.”

After all the preparation that goes into hosting a major event, tournament week should bring a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

“That week is supposed to be an enjoyable week,” Furlong says. “It’s not supposed to be a pull-your-hair-out. If you do all the work beforehand and you do all the stuff leading up to it, it’s supposed to be the most rewarding week of your year or your life if it’s the first televised event you have ever hosted.

“When you host a tournament, it goes by quick. It’s amazing how there’s so much leading up to the event and that week just goes away like the snap of a finger.”

Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer, senior Golf Course Industry contributor and host of the Wonderful Women of Golf podcast.