Anyone getting their course ready for a big event must eventually confront the very tempting aspiration to make it as hard as possible. Whether it’s a club event, a member-guest, a sectional PGA championship or a state amateur, you’d think that would be the right time to let the fangs out and the blood run and let golfers pay their penance for challenging your course.

All too often, this is the mentality of certain sadists on the green committee or the single-digit handicappers at a club who equate quality with difficulty and are shamed if one out of 91 starters breaks par. The fact is, you’d serve the players well if you took up a bit of slack and did not make every hole out there a torture chamber.

We’ve all seen it. Greens at 13 on the Stimpmeter. Tees way back. Flags tucked into corners of greens or perched just above those nasty false fronts that propel the ball back down into the fronting water hazard. It might be a good way to satisfy the egomaniac you answer to. But it’s not a good way to create a good impression. Nor is it necessarily the best way to identify the finest golfer. One thing is for sure – it will lead to slow play, a lot of (justified) grumbling and end up being a lost opportunity to showcase your property.

Ever notice that at every stroke play qualifier, members and regular players at the course are always four shots higher than normal and a half-hour slower? That’s because golfers forced to count every stroke under the actual rules of golf (as opposed to the casual rules they normally play) find themselves sweating out 4-foot return putts — which, by the way, has a dramatic impact on their 40-foot putts, because they suddenly have to worry about where their first putt will wind up, knowing there’s no such thing as a gimme that day. And you want to make the course harder for them?

The dirty little secret of major championship setups — and here I am referring to arrangements at the highest level, by the USGA, the PGA of America and, most certainly, the PGA Tour — is to back off from extremes and provide variety in the presentation.

For one thing, all of these associations are trying to get their star players around in less than six hours. They are also usually smart enough to know that a golf course set up on the edge of doom might just go over the deep end if wind conditions change or the ground gets extremely dry.

No one should ever put out 18 extreme hole locations. Mix it up. I always advise what I call 6-6-6, which means six showcase locations, six moderate ones and six fairly accessible ones. Notice whenever a golf course is listed at, say, 7,800 yards, it is usually set up at 7,450, and this is for the world’s elite players. Overall length is what might be thought of as reserve yardage. One day a hole plays 480, then the next day 425. The same flex goes for par 3s, drivable par 4s and all par 5s.

The drama and challenge for most players in an event is that every stroke they play counts. If you really must put the course on the edge of extreme overkill, save it for the final two-person match following the stroke-play qualifier and the first few rounds of single-elimination match play. Otherwise, the best way to showcase your course and your talents is to focus on smoothness of greens, tightness and firmness of approaches, and pushing the mowing lines around bunkers so there is as little buffer of rough around them and the ball can roll into the sand, not just fly into them. That’s the way to engage the ground elements of the layout in an active, emotionally compelling way without consigning the bulk of your players that day to a hellishly slow and torturous round.

I once arrived at a course consult at a reputable central Ohio private club and was told that one of their goals for the 6,400-yard, par-71 historic layout was to get more yardage out of the tract. On the way to the first tee, I made a diversionary trip around the pro shop to scout out a handwritten scoreboard from a recent three-round, men’s stroke play club championship. The winning score was 13-over par. “I just found your extra yardage,” I told them.

So much for the deep secrets of course setup. They’re just about the same as the common sense ones that prevail for everyday play.

It had always been about the next major championship. Who could argue with the approach?

The pedigree, accommodating membership and unyielding community support netted Oak Hill Country Club a seemingly endless supply of big golf events on its East Course, even as the mega-associations started outgrowing quaint and proud places such as Rochester, New York. The 1950s and ’60s brought a pair of U.S. Opens. The 1980s brought a U.S. Open and a PGA Championship. The 1990s included a raucous Ryder Cup remembered for a rally.

The 2000s gave western New Yorkers a chance to celebrate likely the greatest moments Shaun Micheel (2003) and Jason Dufner (2013) will ever experience on a golf course. Another PGA Championship, the club’s third this century, is just two years away.

Standing on the 10th tee of the famed East Course with former club president and turf advocate Jim McKenna on an idyllic fall morning last October, Oak Hill manager of golf course and grounds Jeff Corcoran observes the scene. A day later, the club will close the course until spring 2021, ending the first season of its post-restoration existence.

Like every day since the course reopened 4½ months earlier, the fairways are filled with members, guests and employees. The pandemic cleared schedules for more golf, the restoration of a Donald Ross course piqued curiosity. For the first time in decades, the people within Corcoran’s and McKenna’s view sparked the revamping of the better known of Oak Hill’s two Donald Ross-designed golf courses.

“The majors had been the impetus for every single change that had been done here over time,” says Corcoran, an upstate New York native who has passionately led Oak Hill’s grounds department for 18 years. “This project was driven by the members more than anything else. We wanted to give them a better product day in and day out. Did we consider the 2023 PGA? Sure, we would be crazy if we didn’t. But that really wasn’t the impetus for doing this.”

The pitching, planning and executing of the Oak Hill East Course restoration suggests a philosophical shift is occurring at clubs within the upper echelons of the industry. In different times, challenging elite players and securing championships convinced club leaders to pursue course enhancement projects. These days, it’s primarily about providing the best possible conditions and most pleasant experience for as many golfers as possible.

Early internal returns on the Andrew Green-guided restoration are overwhelmingly positive. Oak Hill ended 2020 with more members than when the year started and it wasn’t uncommon for the East and West courses to support a combined 400 rounds on weekend days, according to current club president Dr. David Fries.

“If you do something well, you tell people about it,” Fries says. “If you do something really well, they tell you. And the members have come and told us, ‘We love how enjoyable it is now to come and play this.’”

Ross enthusiasts insist the restoration was decades in the making. For those seeking to attempt something similar, the Oak Hill experience demonstrates pushing a major project past the finish line often requires more than a half-decade of tactical and physical work.

And to think, it all started with agronomics. A project nearly 30 years ago that commenced with noble intentions to convert the East Course greens to bentgrass resulted in the fumigation of venerable, hardy and proven Poa annua. A course that had become overcrowded with mature trees further complicated matters. Regardless of the agronomic talent and quality tools Oak Hill accumulated, a mix stand of annual biotype Poa annua and bentgrass emerged and placed limitations on the greens.

“It didn’t offer the playability that Oak Hill was looking for,” Corcoran says.

About those greens

Later during the October morning, Corcoran performs a walk-and-talk on the 14th hole, an uphill par 4 with fewer oaks and sycamores lining the fairway and more heroic options from the tee. The walk from the back tee to the green is just 320 yards.

Upon reaching the green, Corcoran’s purposeful strut becomes a series of gentle steps. He knows what happens on this green and 17 others will determine the long-term success of a restoration that consumed his team for a year. “Our money is on our greens,” Corcoran says.

Bentgrass now covers the East Course greens. Oak Hill’s stable of trained turf managers experienced rapid on-the-job bentgrass education last summer. Even Corcoran had never maintained predominantly bentgrass greens until 2020. “There are times when less is more on the bent vs. the bent/Poa,” he says. “You don’t have to do as much to these greens to get them to roll as fast.”

To give the bentgrass sod a chance to flourish, the club rebuilt East Course greens, which average 4,700 square feet, using a variable depth USGA greens construction method with a mix consisting of 85 percent sand and 15 percent profile. Bentgrass for the project was grown atop the new mix at Boyd Turf’s western Pennsylvania farm.

“There’s an 11 on the Stimpmeter when it’s wet and you’re sticky, and you don’t have rollout. And then there’s an 11 when you’re firm and fast, and the ball rolls out faster,” Corcoran says. “You have height of cut and then you try to dry your greens down. One aspect of that is that you’re always managing your grass at the edge, because you don’t have inherent firmness and you’re trying to get that by reducing moisture. What we tried to do with this mix is to put the firmness in the greens inherently, so we weren’t relying on the moisture aspects. So, in theory, you could keep your grass healthier, but you still have a firm surface.”

The way Corcoran views greens reconstruction — and, again, remember what sparked the entire restoration — below-surface decisions are as critical as any decision a restoration/renovation team will make. “The most important part of the project from my standpoint — and we obviously had Andrew’s input on it — was the greens mix,” he adds.

Manufacturing elite green speed, firmness and consistency without the proper subsurface elements isn’t for the weak, yet amazingly Oak Hill members putted on slick bentgrass/Poa annua greens for decades. The quality of the greens became more astonishing when trained agronomists looked toward the sky. Removing trees in the spirit of turf health remains a challenge for private club superintendents, especially those working at a course with a pleasing variety in its name.

Fries lauds Corcoran and former East/West Course superintendent Kevin Taylor, now the director of agronomy at The Club at New Seabury on Cape Cod, for their ability to use small examples, most notably near the 13th and 15th greens on the West Course and the second green on the East Course, to demonstrate how calculated tree removal can boost turf health. “To Jeff’s and Kevin’s credit, they gave us a couple of spec homes before we bought the whole thing,” Fries says.

Significant tree removal started in 2013, McKenna says, and the club held annual meetings to communicate methodology and future plans to the membership. Corcoran used multiple tools, including mobile apps designed to track sun and shade, to provide the club with data analyzing how specific trees were affecting turf quality and performance. The hiring of Green in 2014 formalized a three-year tree management program.

“There’s a balancing point,” says Green, who also used Ross sketches to restore lost hole locations on edges of greens. “Oak Hill will always have majestic oaks, but it was always about finding the best trees and the trees that were best suited not only for the game, but for the turf.”

Once the restoration commenced on Aug. 6, 2019, around 80 percent of the tree work had been completed. The final 20 percent of trees were removed over the next four months. Neither Green nor committee members envisioned an East Course entirely devoid of its treasured oaks. The tree removal complemented the subsurface work occurring on the prized putting surfaces.

“We feel like we have the environments to produce high-quality bentgrass greens — and that’s our goal,” Corcoran says.

Meanwhile …

Oak Hill values its history like a mechanic treasures a proven engine. Nearly every conversation about the club eventually pivots to its past.

Preparing for the next major championship usually meant further distancing the East Course from its Ross beginnings. The club traces the architectural origins of both courses to Ross, although the West Course developed a reputation as the layout possessing more Ross-like features and character.

With Green involved and the need to rebuild greens apparent, a group of members, including the club’s architectural review committee, wondered if the digging would be worth the hassle without attempting to return the course to its Ross roots. Using input from Rochester native and major champion Jeff Sluman, Green developed a bold plan that included:

• Rebuilding bunkers to make them reflective of a Ross style. “There was thought that the bunkers needed to play more like hazards, especially given that the tree removal widened corridors,” Green says.
• Creating a new par-3 fifth hole with an elevated green surrounded by severe bunkering inspired by Ross’s original sixth hole.
• Using Allen’s Creek as a natural feature to build a new par-4 sixth hole inspired by Ross’s original fifth hole. “The hole that sat on that property from Ross’s time was always well-respected,” Green says. “It was even thought of as one of the best par 4s in the country at the time. Finding a way to put it back together was certainly important to me.”
• Removing a greenside pond on the par-3 15th hole. “The hole only functioned well on Sunday of a major championship where you would hold your breath to take a swing,” Green says. “It never really worked well for the membership.”

Under Green’s plan, the new fifth hole would take the place of a practice hole at the club’s entrance and the new sixth would use the same land as the previous fifth hole. The pond at 15 was installed by George and Tom Fazio in the late 1970s.

“I remember talking to Jeff on the phone and it was like, ‘If we don’t redo those holes, is it worth doing this?’” McKenna says. “It’s spending a lot of money and not doing what’s right for Oak Hill and the course. It was almost one of those depressing calls, thinking, ‘What are we going to do if the membership doesn’t want to do this? Why would we do any of this if we aren’t going to do what’s right for the course?’”

The uneasiness ended when two-thirds of the membership voted to proceed with the project, “which at a country club is almost impossible to get on anything,” McKenna adds.

The club timed the project to begin after the 2019 KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship, giving the restored course three full playing seasons before the 2023 PGA Championship. The pond on No. 15 was drained in early July 2019, one month before a large crew from LaBar Golf Renovations reported to Rochester. Thanks to good weather, LaBar had completed its work by late November 2019.

Watching golfers hit into the sixth green 11 months later, Corcoran, Fries and East Course restoration committee chair Tim Thaney reveal how they were personally affected by the project. The morning sun is lifting, causing the verdant green and transparent creek to sparkle.

“I felt more pressure with this than I have with the championships that we have done here,” Corcoran says.

“You didn’t show it,” Thaney responds.

“Honestly, I told most people that my own true reflection on this project would be probably right now,” Corcoran adds. “Get through a season and see how everything performs. Now that I’m there, it’s like, ‘We have more work to do.’ I don’t think there was a whole lot of margin for error.”

Corcoran is an employee, albeit one who wields enormous respect and responsibility. Fries and Thaney are members. Their professional careers weren’t at stake, but they knew the results would shape their reputations at a place for which they care deeply.

“The people who were responsible for the Fazio changes, they took grief for the rest of their lives,” Thaney says. “They were always on the defense about it and it was sad. They did what they thought was right at the time, but they took grief, not only from the members, but they heard it from people outside the club.”

By listening to a deep team of agronomic and architectural experts, Fries always believed they were steering the club in the right direction.

“You might have had some sleepless nights,” he says. “But every book that was out there and every architect that you talked to — and it wasn’t just Andrew — was telling you this is what you need to do. We were doing everything we should, we were following best practices, doing everything we should be doing for the health of the course. It had to work because 20 other people who were experts in the industry were telling you that you were doing the right thing.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s editor-in-chief.

Mitch Savage has a fondness for par-3 courses. He’s worked at three different facilities that feature short layouts, including CommonGround Golf Course, a public facility in Aurora, Colorado, where he celebrates his first anniversary as the head superintendent this month.

Savage, who started working on golf courses when he was in high school before matriculating at the University of Minnesota, believes that short courses have an essential place in the golf industry. “I think they’re critical, especially when you look at the generations of younger folks who are hopefully going to be picking up golf clubs,” he says. “I think we certainly saw that in 2020more people were venturing out into golf courses. But I think the biggest thing with the younger generation is they aren’t going to be quite as apt to want to spend as much time on the golf course as some of the older generation or the golf purists.”

CommonGround serves as the headquarters for the Colorado Golf Association. Its championship course attracts an abundance of Denver-area golfers and visiting tourists. But its 9-hole short course is no less popular. Designed by Tom Doak, it was built roughly a decade ago in conjunction with a renovation of the championship course.

The layout measures 997 yards with holes ranging in length from 72 to 142 yards. It features just a single bunker and greens are that generally flat. “It’s definitely a welcoming course for someone who is either not experienced at golf or a higher handicapper,” Savage says.

The short course has a varied clientele to say the least. On a typical day, visitors might include groups of ladies or seniors looking to spend a relaxing morning on the course but who might only have a finite amount of time available.

Some low handicappers might turn up, seeking to work on their short games. And then there are those who are new to the game and experiencing golf for the first time in a comfortable setting.

“You definitely can tell when you have the low handicapper out using it as a practice facility,” Savage says. “They’ll tend to hit a few more balls into the greens and they’re working on specific shots and stuff, but overall, you just kind of get the person who wants to come out and play a quick nine holes in an hour or less and enjoy their time in a foursome with a group of friends.”

In 2020, rounds on the short course increased by 112 percent over the previous year. Many of those rounds were complimentary; CommonGround allows those 18-and-under to play the short course without charge.

During the golf season, Savage’s staff numbers approximately 15, including himself, an assistant and a mechanic, for 27 holes. He does not specifically assign a crew to the short course.

“It’s a team effort,” he says, “and we just incorporate the maintenance of that part of the property. It’s just part of our daily maintenance routine. That’s not to say that I don’t someday see myself possibly assigning an individual or two to kind of give them ownership of it, kind of have a foreman that runs the show down there for me, but at the moment we don’t. It’s a team effort.”

In terms of agronomy the two courses differ in that the par-3 course features push-up greens while the putting surfaces on the championship course are sand-based. But the two courses are maintained in similar fashion.

“We do treat those par-3 course greens,” Savage says. “We fertilize, we spray them, we aerate them. They basically are on a very similar, if not the exact same, management program as any other green out here on the golf course but they are a different soil makeup.”

Savage developed many of his philosophies about maintaining a par-3 course when he worked at Broken Tee Golf Course in Inglewood, Colorado, another Denver suburb.

“When I became superintendent at Broken Tee, I just felt it was important to place as much importance and priority on the par-3 course as I could,” Savage recalls. “Certainly, if something comes up, you have to tend to the championship course first. But from my days at Broken Tee and everything we’ve done here at CommonGround it’s certainly not just (a case of) ‘We’ll get to the par-3 course when we get to it.’ Some days, we will intentionally send somebody down to mow the par-3 course greens while somebody starts on the championship greens and then when they’re done on the par-3 greens, they jump in on the championship course.”

Like he did at Broken Tee, Savage strives for his team to complete work on the short course without interfering with play.

“I noticed (at Broken Tee) that the par-3 course would get busy in the mornings and I didn’t want to be up there getting in peoples’ way trying to mow a green when they’re trying to enjoy a nice, quiet morning on the par-3 course,” he says. “So, I’ve always tried to find a way and work with my crew to say, ‘Hey, this is going to be a busy morning on the par-3 course, potentially. Let’s make sure we get up there and get greens mowed and get some of the most important maintenance needs done so that if we have to go back at a later time, we’re not as intrusive.’”

Apart from daily play, the short course fills an essential role in CommonGround’s and the Colorado Golf Association’s efforts to grow the game. It is a venue for various junior clinics, Ronald McDonald Houses, Special Olympics and Big Brothers/Big Sisters events to name a few. Savage is also planning to host GCSAA First Green field trips. He sees short courses having a key role in the game’s future.

“Whether they be 6-hole courses or 9-hole courses, whatever they may be, they offer just a quick, fun in and out,” Savage says. “You still get fresh air, get exercise, and enjoy the game of golf, but you don’t have to make a four- or five-hour commitment to do it. I think that’s going to be critical to getting people to pick up clubs and keeping them interested in the game of golf.”

During the weeks and months after the old Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant shuttered for good, Maxine Griswold stayed on her feet and filled her days waiting tables around Windsor, Vermont.

Griswold had celebrated her 53rd birthday less than a month earlier. She was happy and able to wait tables, but after so many years inside the plant she wanted more. Where was the thrill? Where was the fun?

Just a couple miles south of the plant, as it turned out, inside the clubhouse of a 9-hole golf course.

Over more than 30 springs, summers and falls, Griswold tended bar, collected green fees and generally kept the clubhouse in working order at John P. Larkin Country Club, a public course where a strong and errant drive can land in the Connecticut River and where the tee boxes and clubhouse alike filled up over the years with an incredible cast of characters. There were business leaders, of course, and small business owners, all of them churning and chipping alongside each other. There were the longtime regulars, too, who played three or four rounds every week, then headed inside afterward for a couple more. There was a retired arborist named Jacques who was dubbed Jocko (or perhaps Jacques-o) because everybody in Windsor seems to have a nickname. There were Griswold’s own sons, Dennis, an executive chef, and Don, a mechanic everybody called Grizzy who once considered golf to be “a stupid game” before he started fixing carts and received a set of clubs from his brother. There was Griswold herself, often clapping backs, grabbing behinds and imbibing in an occasional Scotch, to hear Grizzy tell the story.

And, in 1978, there was a young couple, just married and just arrived in Windsor, who joined the club — JPL for short, still another nickname — and started playing most Friday nights. They were in their 20s and already quickly becoming a part of the fabric of the club, a part of the next generation.

But after five or six seasons, they welcomed their first child, a son, and they played less and less often, and then not at all. Life interrupted their time on the links.

More regulars followed their exit, for all sorts of reasons, and JPL struggled. Like so many thousands of other courses across the country, its very survival teetered more than once.

Again and again, it managed to hang on.

Lifelong learner

Unless you happen to be driving in from Maine, New Hampshire, parts of northern New York or Vermont, or perhaps Quebec, you can follow Interstate 91 North all the way to the Hartland / Windsor exit to reach John P. Larkin Country Club. The course is about two and a half miles off the ramp and it can sneak up on you, a beautiful flash of green as you drive along U.S. Route 5.

Windsor is home to one entrance to what was, for more than 150 years, the country’s longest covered bridge. The Constitution of Vermont, the first document in U.S. history to explicitly ban slavery, was signed in the town back in July 1777 and gives the town its own nickname: the Birthplace of Vermont. Windsor is the kind of place where state championship high school teams receive a police and fire escort through the square, conquering heroes returning to flashing headlights and honking horns.

It is home to JPL, too, one of 21 9-holers and 66 total facilities spread across the Green Mountain State — and to Bob Hingston, the former Windsor High School athletics director and dean of students who started working at the club shortly after he stepped back from those positions in 2015. Hingston worked at a local hardware store and later in sporting goods before shifting full time to coaching but ask around and most everybody knows him as Mr. Windsor. He seemed to be at every Yellowjackets home game for 16 years. He could run for mayor if that post existed.

Hingston maintained a variety of playing fields, courts and surfaces during those years but he had next to no golf course maintenance experience when former JPL superintendent Steve Ashworth mentioned he could use more help outside. Hingston was just shy of his 64th birthday and had started working in the clubhouse earlier that summer, about 20 hours a week. He added some mowing to his schedule. The next summer, he was outside with Ashworth full time.

“Bob picked up things very quickly,” Ashworth says. “You sent him off to do something, it got done. You didn’t have to check it.”

Ashworth retired from the position in 2017 after two full decades at the club — he was the mechanic his first two years — to return to his family farm in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, where he spends days baling hay and tending to bees. The board hired Bo Taft, a talented young turf pro who had worked most recently at The Quechee Club in Quechee, Vermont. Hingston worked alongside Taft as he had Ashworth, soaking up enough knowledge of process and projects that when Taft received an offer he couldn’t turn down early during the 2019 season — superintendent at Hanover Country Club at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire — Hingston was able to step up to interim superintendent. On the brink of 68, Hingston was working more than 70 hours a week.

“Bo gave about a month’s notice so I started drinking up more knowledge from him,” Hingston says. “I knew about mowing, the importance of keeping grass at the right level, mowing in different directions for the health of the plant, watering. Steve was really good about teaching me what to look for on the greens — dollar spot, whether it needed more moisture — and I learned about fertilizers a little bit, but I was a novice for sure. I never thought I would have to run things.”

JPL is a small enough course in terms of acreage and budget that there is almost never money for a traditional assistant superintendent. That first season, Hingston filled his summer crew with three teenagers — a 17-year-old named Dylan DeSchamp who’s now a freshman studying turfgrass at Penn State, a 16-year-old named Caden and a 15-year-old named Cooper.

“The big challenge was there was some stuff I couldn’t have them do,” Hingston says. “Because of his age, I couldn’t have Cooper driving any of the big mowers, I couldn’t have him running the chainsaw when we were cutting brush. He could run a weedwacker and he could run a push-mower, but he had to do a bunch of the grunt work because of his age.”

Hingston promised Friday cheeseburgers from nearby Frazer’s Place if the teenage trio worked hard during the week — though he admits, “I was always going to buy them anyway.” At the end of the first season, Hingston lobbied the board for the three to receive more substantial cash bonuses. The board agreed.

A fan of collaboration and a builder of relationships, Hingston also developed working friendships with several area superintendents just as he had over the years with area athletics directors. That allowed for regular equipment exchanges and afforded JPL the use of a fairway aerator from neighboring Claremont Country Club, just over the river in Claremont, New Hampshire, and a verticutter from Granliden Golf Course in Sunapee, New Hampshire — both thanks to current Granliden general manager Andy Fowler. Hingston supplements his active, on-course education by watching Grizzy work on equipment and breaking down YouTube videos as if they were game film.

“Even at my age, you truly can be a lifelong learner,” says Hingston, who is the son of two educators, the grandson of another, and a graduate of Springfield College, where James Naismith created basketball and Amos Alonzo Stagg helped pioneer modern football. “You’re never too old.”

Developing the future

Hingston is old enough, though, to implement a succession plan for JPL. He will become a septuagenarian this summer, after all.

Prior to the 2020 season, the board hired Travis Williams, more than a quarter of a century Hingston’s junior, who had worked at Claremont as well as at two Colorado courses before a 12-year detour into carpentry. The pandemic delayed the formal superintendent transition by a season and is in full swing as tee sheets start to fill up next month.

Because of the addition of a second fulltime turf pro, the budget allowed for only one of the three teenagers to return last season. In love with turf, DeSchamp dived in while his classmates and former colleagues opted for summer spots with a local landscaping company and a family carpentry business.

“I started to learn how to use the greens mower the first week of my second summer,” DeSchamp says. “My third summer, I continued to mow the greens and I started to mow the fairways and work with Bob and Travis on irrigation.” He can add rough and tee box mowing, and equipment maintenance to his growing résumé, too.

At Penn State, his advisor “is a turf management professor and he was pretty surprised about how far along I’ve come and what I’ve done on courses. I think working at a small 9-hole course with a low number of staff helped. You have to know how to do everything.”

“Dylan is a stud,” Williams says. “He’s going to handle a private golf course someday. … He’s a great student, he’s great at what he does and he can do pretty much everything. And we have him for one more year.”

With Hingston, Williams and DeSchamp on the course this season, JPL should be able to continue a long turnaround that has improved playing conditions, further beautified a course that already has stunning mountain views — and helped add 36 new members last season, increasing the total to 143.

And there is work to do.

“The course is so quirky,” says Williams, who gained an interest in turf after watching his Dad, Larry, mow and stripe their nearby acre and a half plot throughout his childhood. “It’s the fine line between ‘you have to do things a certain way’ and ‘that’s the way they’ve always been done.’

“We have to fix the third green. It’s been every superintendent’s nemesis. We have to fix that this year. The soil is really bad and it just doesn’t grow grass on one corner. It’s embarrassing and it’s looked like that forever. We have to expand the seventh green, too, because that’s gotten shorter and shorter every year. And the eighth green, I have to get control on eight. It’s down in a hole and doesn’t get any air and the mold just takes over.”

“It’s not the longest course and it doesn’t have the biggest undulations in the green,” says Ryan Hingston, the 36-year-old son of Bob and his wife, Candy. Ryan returned to Windsor in late 2019 after six winters in the ski industry to live closer to the rest of his family and now manages the clubhouse. “But golf is a game where you don’t have to have all those crazy challenges in order for it to be a challenge. There are some small greens at JPL and it’s pretty wide open, but we still have a lot of high-level golfers come here and struggle a little bit. As long as you have a good environment and you’re around people you want to be around and everybody’s respectful, it’s still a great day on the golf course.”

Ryan would know. A Windsor native, he played the course probably thousands of times starting around age 10 — about a decade after his parents, once that young couple new to town who became Friday regulars — through high school. The course was a part of his life even when he focused more on baseball and football, playing in a combined three state championship games in those sports and winning one gridiron crown.

The course is still a part of life — not just for Ryan or his parents, but for anybody who wants to play nine or 18 holes.

Every local business is important in a town with fewer than 4,000 residents where every major employer is long gone — Cone Blanchard, a machine tool manufacturer, and the Southeast State Correctional Facility eventually followed Goodyear — and every tax dollar is important. JPL is almost a public trust, but it will never be run as a nonprofit, multiple people around the town say, because its property tax value and annual water bill are too valuable for the town to give up.

“It’s a working man’s course,” says Grizzy, a 17-year member and longtime mechanic who started working on the club’s equipment a couple years ago. “And the people who actually play there are very friendly people. Next thing you know, you have 20 or 30 people sitting on the back deck, having a good time, everybody knows everybody. It’s really nice.”

Everybody’s home course

What does the future hold for 9-holers in general and for JPL in particular? More than one-quarter of all the 14,336 golf facilities across the country contain a 9-hole course — 26.3 percent, to be exact — according to the 2020 Golf Facilities Report published by the National Golf Foundation. Couple that with the increase in rounds played and the corresponding rise of new and returning golfers and an industry more willing than ever before to cater to different skills and play preferences, and that percentage might go up over the next decade.

“The last two, three years, the place has thrown money at the turf,” says Taft, the former superintendent who now handles campus turf at Dartmouth since the school closed Hanover Country Club. Taft is still tied to JPL, talking regularly with Hingston and Williams, and serving as a board member. “They realize we’re offering one thing: a golf course. So a lot of our money went into equipment, went into more chemicals and fertilizers. The place hadn’t had a roller for 20 years. Now we have a roller.”

And the increase in rounds played and members added portends at least another good year or two. And most of the familiar faces will be around.

Williams is the superintendent now, in name and duties, and he seems to have control of most of the quirks. DeSchamp will be back for his fourth and final summer working on the course before heading out for internships and, eventually, the start of his own professional career. The regulars, Grizzy and Jocko and the rest, will cheer him on and probably keep tabs. They might even give him a nickname of his own.

Ryan Hingston is centered on growing the club even more, building back the membership perhaps not to its peak of 400 or so but certainly closer to 160, 180, maybe even 200. Candy Hingston, meanwhile, plans to retire next summer from Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center, and Bob Hingston plans to finally scale back. Not that anybody believes he will, Candy included. “He will never stop working,” she says, “and I don’t want him to. That’s not good for him. That’s not who he is.” (The most popular scenario forecasts him brewing coffee and mowing greens from 5 to 9 every morning.)

After more than three decades working in the clubhouse — and working well past her 85th birthday — she suffered a stroke last April and moved into a nursing home earlier this year.

“She ran the place like clockwork,” says Grizzy. “She lived for working there. My Mother ran that club.”

“When you think of the golf course, you think of Maxine,” says Taft, who handed his green fee to Griswold when he played the course growing up. “In Windsor, we live and die by people like Grizzy and Jocko, all the people who come and help us. It’s a close, tightknit community and it takes each one of us to help the place survive.

“Without them, we may not make it.”

But when everybody knows everybody — and everybody supports everybody — even the toughest jobs get a little easier.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.