Superintendent Radio Network: Month in Review November 2024

Another month, another half a dozen new episodes on Superintendent Radio Network. I’m biased, but I loved all of them — traveling out to Washington and Wyoming, crossing the Atlantic for the second straight month, talking about baseball and apprenticeships and Myrtle Beach … there’s a lot going on. There’s always a lot going on. You can listen to every episode on Apple, Spotify, our own website, or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Publisher + editor-in-chief Guy Cipriano opened the month with a fantastic Disease Discussion conversation with Josh Truan, the director of Gamble Sands in Brewster, Washington. Truan arrived in Brewster a dozen years ago, when the rather remote resort was just popping up on a bluff overlooking the Columbia and Okanogan rivers. “I remember driving around, going, ‘Where the heck am I? Is there really a golf course up here? There’s no way there’s really a golf course up here. I’m going up here to die. This is where it ends, right now.’ And we get up on top and there it is.” Truan dives deep into his own story and into the philosophies he and his team use to control plenty of disease, including fairy ring.

Superintendent Radio Network crossed more time zones than I can keep straight after our next episode — No. 41 in the Wonderful Women of Golf series — traveled to Europe for a chat with Lara Arias, the former superintendent at Marco Simone, where she hosted three Italian Opens and the Ryder Cup from 2021 to 2023. Arias is now an agronomist and a consultant with Turfgrass Agronomy & Services, which is headquartered in Spain, and she has split this season between Italy and France — with a transatlantic trip mixed in to volunteer at the Solheim Cup at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia. “Every time I go to another country, I’m learning a new language,” she told host Rick Woelfel, adding that she speaks, ahem, four languages. “For me, this experience in the industry is also about language and different cultures: How we can grow up in the industry and how we can grow up as a person in the world.”

Golf course labor leaders Tyler Bloom, Paul Koch and Carson Letot had never gathered together in even the same virtual space until earlier this month. I hope their Beyond the Page roundtable about the increasing importance of apprenticeships in golf course maintenance is not the last time they hang out and trade ideas. “If you’re getting everything you need with more of a traditional model — four-year students and two-year students and interns — maybe you don’t need to change,” said Koch, a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the head of the school’s Turfgrass Apprenticeship Program. “But I would visit golf courses, even a few years pre-COVID, and they wouldn’t want to talk about snow mold or dollar spot or anthracnose. They’d want to talk about how they couldn’t find anyone to work on the damn crew.” Bloom is a former superintendent and the head of Tyler Bloom Consulting, and Letot is an instructor at Sandhills Community College and the coordinator for the USGA’s Greenkeeper Apprenticeship Program.

Some turf pros were merely adopted by golf. Ben Herberger was born in it, molded by it. Herberger, now the equipment technician at Shooting Star Golf Club in Teton Village, Wyoming, was born and raised in Oregon, where his great-grandfather worked as a golf course superintendent and his grandfather owned and operated Oregon City Golf Club in 1950. “Shoot, I think I was 5 years old, going out and helping my dad change cups, carrying his bucket and running after the flag,” he told Trent Manning on Reel Turf Techs. Herberger shares stories about how he moved from maintenance to equipment (there might have been a motorcycle involved), why he and his family moved from Oregon to Wyoming, and more in a great episode.

Guy also talked this month with Garrett Wasson, a former Division I baseball player whose knees are thanking him since he traded his catcher’s gear for the (normally) more forgiving grind endured by golf course architects. Wasson started his career in 2009, which qualifies him as a relative newbie in that corner of the industry, and he launched Wasson Golf Design in 2023. “You have to start with confidence and belief in yourself,” he told Guy on Episode 101 of Tartan Talks. “It’s not an easy thing to do. Golf design is a hard business to first get your foot in the door and it’s also a hard business to stay in. You need to be patient because not everything you design gets built right away.” 

The month wrapped up with Guy and me behind the mic recapping another fantastic week at the Carolinas GCSA Conference and Show in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This was Guy’s 10th trip to the show and my fifth — and the first for assistant editor Kelsie Horner, who is busy writing about both her experience in the Palmetto State and Horry Georgetown Technical College’s fifth straight Turf Bowl win — and it’s starting to feel like old times. Who did we talk with? What did we talk about? What courses did we visit? Oh, and where did we eat? All that and more on Greens with Envy 64.

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Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.