2026 Numbers to Know: Nothing’s normal anymore

Some superintendents leave the golf course as quickly as they can after their work is done. James Doepke is not among them.

After five full seasons at Galena Golf Course, located in the northwest corner of Illinois, just miles from both Iowa and Wisconsin, Doepke describes himself as “a golf nut.” He played his own course just about every Wednesday during league night. He joined as many as a dozen friends most weekends for 18 or 36 holes at other clubs. He played somewhere between 40 and 50 rounds across 2025.

“I do think it’s important for a superintendent to play golf, because you see the golf course from the golfer’s point of view,” he says. “There are things I see when I’m golfing: We missed this, or We gotta do this, or You’re right, that does look bad. So many of us are tired of being there and getting beaten down that the last thing you want to do is go play golf. I understand why guys don’t play. I have good buddies who go sit on a lake and fish.

“But I’m a golf nut.”

Even after the rigors of the last season.

Like so many superintendents across the Midwest in particular and large swaths of the country in general, Doepke worked through cool, then wet, then hot, then hot and wet, then hot and humid, “which led to umpteen issues with diseases and all the other crap that goes with it, blowing budgets out of the water, trying to keep grass alive,” he says. He worked through about a month’s worth of nights with temperatures of at least 70 degrees and humidity well over 50 percent. “And what that does to bentgrass is not good.”

Doepke sprayed a variety of plant protectants about twice as often as he normally does — about every 10 days, rather than every three weeks. During the middle of August, much of the turf was as green as it normally is on June 1. He was mowing rough through the third week of September.

“By the end of the year, the grass had just given up on a couple of the greens where we don’t have good air movement, good sunlight, things like that,” he says. “We did some overseeding and stuff, dug the algae out of it, but algae was rampant at our golf course pretty much the entire season.”

And within 10 days of shutting down for the season, the course was covered in more than a foot of a snow. No time to winterize the sprayer. No time to power wash equipment. No time to finish resodding bunker entrances. Just some agronomic challenges in addition to looming business challenges: Galena Golf Course will need to build a new clubhouse and install a new irrigation system in the next few years, with a season pass group whose average age now hovers around 55. “We’re facing capital expenditures between $3 million and $7 million,” Doepke says. “We are a financially solvent course, but we are not that financially solvent.”

But there is more than the hint of a silver lining under big projects and so much snow cover.

“I have never had what you would consider a normal year here,” Doepke says. “It’s either been a drought or a flood. I’m not a fan of winter at all, but the snow is here, golf season is over, so let’s see what the winter brings and take it from there. The last four winters, we haven’t had probably a total of two feet of snow, let alone this early,” he says. “So, this is good. This will help. Hopefully, we can get back to balance and have a normal spring.

“But there’s nothing normal about the weather patterns anymore.”

— Matt LaWell