Inside the Cut

Zoysiagrass started growing. The workspace remained primitive.

 

The early stages of Trinity Forest Golf Club offered stark contrasts to its current state as a Dallas private golf haven and site of the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson.

 

The agronomic team embarked on a grow-in sparking industrywide curiosity – the hitting surfaces on all but two holes were sprigged with L1F (now called Trinity) zoysiagrass – while operating out of steel shipping containers. The crew had no permanent equipment besides the items in equipment manager Tony Bevelo’s toolbox and a backlap machine. “It was rough on the guys,” Bevelo says.

 

Director of grounds Kasey Kauff says transforming sprigged zoysiagrass into a playable condition consumed the equivalent of nine growing months. The process started with the sprigging of the 14th fairway on July 4, 2015 and culminated with the Oct. 28, 2016 unveiling of the Bill Coore- and Ben Crenshaw-designed golf course. The agronomic team went more than a year between the first sprigging and the Aug. 1, 2016 opening of the club’s maintenance facility.

 

Enduring the humble beginnings included a major assist from Austin Turf & Tractor, a John Deere dealer with a significant presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Austin Turf provided grinding reels – a necessity Trinity Forest lacked until moving into the maintenance facility – and a half-dozen pieces of loaner equipment to mow the young turf. Austin Turf sales representative Jon Manning and principals Chad Mobley and Harry Jukes visited the course dozens of times as a rotating John Deere loaner fleet consisting of an 8700A PrecisionCut fairway mower, two 2500B triplexes and three 260SL PrecisionCut walking greens mowers prepared zoysiagrass fairways and tees and Champion Bermudagrass greens for play. Every time Trinity Forest needed equipment during the lengthy grow-in, the Austin Turf team responded with a timely delivery.

 

“There’s a lot of stuff that we pulled off that wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for Austin Turf,” Bevolo says. “It’s hard to put into words what they do.”

 

During the spring of 2016, Manning worked with Kauff and Bevolo to help establish Trinity Forest’s first four-year equipment lease. A mowing fleet consisting of seven 7500A PrecisionCut and two 8700A PrecisionCut fairway mowers, six 2500B triplexes and 10 220E walking green mowers was stored in a temporary white circus-like tent until the completion of the maintenance facility. The tent developed into a part of Trinity Forest grow-in lore. The door wasn’t big enough to maneuver a fairway mower or sprayer through, so Bevolo crafted a sizable indentation using a backhoe.

 

The opening of the maintenance facility symbolized a milestone in Trinity Forest’s development: the start of daily maintenance. Fairways are now mowed twice a week at .300 inches; greens are mowed six times a week at .100. “We were all ready to start maintaining a golf course,” Bevolo says. “We were done with projects and haul roads and dump trucks. After coming from a golf course where you are on a regiment, it was very relieving getting into a maintenance mode.”

 

The debut of golf further strengthened the relationship between Trinity Forest and Austin Turf. Trinity Forest worked with John Deere to create a parts-on-site program and Austin Turf customer service representative Ray Plasencio visits the club weekly to replenish inventory.

 

Austin Turf provides significant support during the AT&T Byron Nelson, delivering fairway units with lightweight reels two weeks before the tournament. Instead of using units with 7-inch reels like other warm-season courses, Trinity Forest maintains fairways with 5-inch reels to ensure the low height of fairway cut.

 

“You have to have support when you’re hosting a tournament,” Kauff says. “We need more fairway mowers for the event and there’s no reason for the club to be at 13 or 14 fairways mowers year-round, because we don’t use that on a day-to-day basis. We use a fairway mower that’s so lightweight and the cut is so short on fairways that they don’t have any around town. Austin Turf brings them down from Iowa. Bentgrass courses are using them because the reels are so lightweight. They go out of their way to find those mowers for us.”

 

The mowers arrived two weeks before the tournament. The Austin Turf team is omnipresent during the event, providing uniforms and meals for staff and agronomy volunteers. “It feels like a family when you’re dealing with them,” Kauff says.