E pluribus unum

How can a single golf course maintenance pro accurately compare how greens are playing at two, or four, or eight golf courses — or, say, 26 golf courses — especially when all those greens are separated by hundreds of miles? For most of the history of golf, the answer rested somewhere between It’s a bit of a challenge and Is that a serious question? Forget about the decades of feel over formula on the course: The technology didn’t exist off the course until most of this generation of superintendents was already out of school and on the job. Just think about the challenges of dialing long distance even a couple decades ago.

Which makes the conversation Craig Walsh had with Mike Beverly in late 2022 all the more revolutionary.

Beverly is the president and CEO of Sunbelt Golf Corporation, which manages the expansive Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail up and down Alabama. Walsh was interviewing for the vice president position to oversee maintenance at all 450 holes.

“‘We’re really, really inconsistent from golf course to golf course,’” Walsh remembers Beverly telling him. “‘Our greens are really inconsistent.’”

“‘That could be a wide range of things,’” Walsh responded. “‘Is that detail? Is it surface management?’

“‘Really, just overall.’”

So Walsh hit the road, most of his truck miles along Interstate 65, “and what caught me off guard,” he says, “was the amount of weed pressure the Trail had. Around the greens, it was just — Oh, my. … We had to improve conditions to retain customers.” Walsh told Beverly he could do that.

“But knowing there are 26 golf courses and they all had the same problem with weed pressure was the biggest negative,” he says. Walsh sketched out a five-year plan. “And I think we’re way out in front of that. We’re night and day where we were three years ago.”

After visiting 450 holes across 26 courses and 11 sites, from Muscle Shoals down to Point Clear, Walsh called an industry veteran who had visited the Trail regularly for nearly two decades and was familiar with it almost from its earliest days.

Now the director of agronomy for the USGA, Chris Hartwiger consulted with the Trail as a USGA Green Section agronomist starting in 2007. He lived in Bimingham for 27 years before relocating to Pinehurst, North Carolina, in a 2022, and he visited every Trail site every year. He had a feel for the turf. And he was starting to lean in more to science and data.

“‘I think there’s a lot of variability with the product that golfers experience,’” Walsh told Hartwiger.

“‘Well, how do you know?’” Hartwiger asked. “‘What have you measured?’”

“‘I haven’t measured anything. It’s just what I think.’”

Hartwiger told Walsh that his “intuition may be correct,” and proposed a road trip. During the spring of 2023, Walsh and Hartwiger visited all 11 sites along the Trail, “and we measured performance characteristics with all the tools I had at my disposal,” Hartwiger says. “And yes, indeed, there was tremendous variability in green speed” — from about 8 on the Stimpmeter at some sites up to 11 at others — “firmness, organic matter, smoothness, trueness, sheer strength. I coupled that with asking the superintendents, ‘What do you view as the corporate expectation for something simple like green speed? And from 11 superintendents, I probably got eight or nine different answers.”

Walsh needed a standard. “‘Unless you have one,’” Hartwiger remembers telling him, “‘you’re just inherently going to have variability.’”

Hartwiger suggested adding two organic matter testings each year — “to tell if the topdressing is enough,” Walsh says. Hartwiger also proposed adding the USGA’s GS3 Ball to the maintenance routine at every site.

“We knew the first year that it was really going to be a gamechanger,” Walsh says. Daily data collection was big, “not only for improving our putting surface, our smoothness and trueness, but now the health of that putting surface.” So was heavier topdressing and measuring grass clippings every day and, starting during the second year of the new program, a switch to solid tine aerification. Teaching site directors how to monitor nitrogen outputs and organic matter has also been key.

“Now they know, if they’re at two ounces of clippings, they’re going to meet the green speed standard of 10 to 11,” Walsh says. “‘Oh, my clippings are going up? I need to adjust double cutting, I need to adjust topdressing, I’m not going to put out nitrogen this week or I’ll put out a lower rate, or I need to bump my PGRs.’”

Walsh doesn’t know yet whether all this data will lead to increased revenue — he suspects it will if it isn’t already — but he is quick to say that golfer feedback after aeration has been much more positive, the greens are healthier and, pertinent to his original conversation with Beverly, the greens are more consistent around the Yellowhammer State.

“We’re all definitely on the same team and have common goals,” says Jim Mason, who took over as director of maintenance at Magnolia Grove in Mobile on New Year’s Day 2023.

Mason talks regularly with other turf pros across the Trail — especially Trevor Richardson at Cambrian Ridge in Greenville and Jason Childres at Lakewood Club in Point Clear — swapping notes about day-to-day maintenance, capital and budget planning, and those greens. “We touch a little bit of everything,” Mason says. “Just trying to help one another out. It could be as simple as what herbicide we’re using on a certain weed or what kind of sand we’re using for aeration. It was eye-opening how much nitrogen was in our soil and roots that was mineralizing, and how little we could actually control the growth on these greens. We really tried to dial back the inputs in controlling the massive surges.”

Mason, Richardson, Childress and the other site directors receive plenty of support in addition to their text chain. Walsh visits each site about once every month. Hartwiger visits each site twice a year, once in early spring then again in the middle of summer. He also talks periodically with each site director over Zoom and sends a handful of detailed reports throughout the year.

Mason studies them all, comparing Magnolia Grove to other sites. “We see certain trends at certain times of year, who might be doing certain things better than others,” he says. “And maybe what they’re doing differently.”

What works for 26 golf courses has to work for eight, or four, or even two, right?

Hartwiger thinks what he’s working on with the Trail will work for other multi-course operations: Greens drive the on-course experience, and most multi-course operators don’t know what’s happening across their greens week to week, much less day to day.

“Everyone has blind spots,” he says. “Is it a concern to you that you might not know something about your turf conditions? How do you create the right targets for each facility? And how do you monitor whether they’re hitting the targets?

“We’re helping uncover key variables to make greens good in the short term and perform over the long term. ”

Hartwiger is incorporating the USGA’s DEACON app —which stores the data and makes site-specific analysis readily available — with reports to multi-course operators like the RTJ Trail. And he and Walsh both recommend mapping out and following a four- to five-year plan.

“Year 1 is collecting information and reviewing where a facility is. What is the amount of variability in your performance metrics? What does it look like in a linear fashion over time? And how do the pieces of the puzzle fit together? Year 2 helps establish reasonable targets. That’s when the golf course can begin orienting its management practices and inputs around the targets they set. By Year 3, the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together and people are getting pretty good at hitting their target and narrowing those peaks and valleys.

“By Year 4, it’s time to fire Chris because hopefully I’ve given them the right tools and the right way to look at their data so they can make great decisions for their facility.”

“Everyone can see quantitatively it’s getting better, and we expect it to be getting better,” Mason says. “We’re all trying to get better together.”