Double duty

Everyday maintenance and operations hummed along throughout Matt McDonald’s first nine seasons at Water’s Edge Golf Club in Worth, Illinois. Everything hummed along during his 10th season at the Chicagoland course, too — just to a slightly different tune.

McDonald arrived at Water’s Edge a decade ago this month after five years as an assistant superintendent at two other area courses. He honed his craft as the superintendent, developing a 14-person team, working outside five or six hours almost every day and collaborating with folks in the clubhouse to provide a memorable experience in a crowded market. Then he joined those folks in the clubhouse.

Water’s Edge operated without a general manager throughout the 2023-24 offseason. As opening day 2024 neared, McDonald told his direct reports at Orion Golf, which manages the club, that he “would be able to do a bit extra if need be.”

“‘Oh, we’re really glad to hear that,’” he recalls them telling him, “‘because you’re the guy we’re going to trust.’”

The Pittsburgh transplant is still figuring out the finer details of balancing work as both the superintendent and the GM — he now works more indoors than outdoors, and he knows that once the clubhouse pulls you in for the day it is nearly impossible to return to the turf — but after a year in the dual role, he has learned plenty. Chief among those lessons? “Trust people on your team to do a good job,” he says. “My management style has always been more guide people than direct people.”

That starts with his assistant superintendent, Brian Lysne, now in his third season. McDonald delegates plenty of responsibility to Lysne — which, he says, has been perhaps his biggest hurdle.

“If you move onto a new superintendent job, you’re off the property, you’re gone. You’re not there to witness it on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “We’re not having any issues, it’s just giving up that control but still being here every day is a challenge for me.”

McDonald also relies on equipment manager Manuel Gomez, a 20-plus-year industry veteran who literally walked in one day, said his last course had closed and he needed a new position. He remembered Water’s Edge because it appeared in the background of his daughter’s wedding photos.

McDonald oversees 11 other maintenance team members, five of them full-timers, though he now works closely with assistant GM Debbie Schneider, food and beverage manager Kristi Chmura and golf pro Chris Hoffman. “As long as I have a strong team,” he says, “it’s fairly simple.”

He has also worked with the management team to engineer a better experience on the course: Water’s Edge moved its opening tee time from 30 minutes after sunrise to 7 a.m. every day and extended tee-time intervals from eight minutes to 10. “We didn’t lose anything,” he says. In fact, rounds played last year remained right around 34,000 and year-over-year revenue actually increased 4 percent.

Course conditions are an important part of that success, and McDonald has relied throughout his decade at Water’s Edge on a variety of SePRO products — most notably Legacy and Cutless MEC plant growth regulators.

“Legacy has been the biggest one,” McDonald says. The village owns the property and has a 99-year lease with the water reclamation district, and “part of the deal with the construction of the course was they were going to use biosolids. But they used way too much and it is so nutrient-dense that I haven’t put a granular piece of fertilizer on any piece of the property except for greens and tees, which are sand-based. Stopping growth is No. 1 on my list.” He subscribes to 16 ounces of Legacy per acre every two weeks.

He’s also a fan of SePRO’s SeClear algaecide and water quality enhancer and Sonar aquatic herbicide. “We didn’t really treat the ponds at all the first couple years and we got algae and duckweed really bad each year,” he says. The SeClear and Sonar handle everything.

Even now — more inside than out, learning to hand off responsibilities — there are some constants for McDonald. They even hold the same tune. 