Year of the Ram

The time to wager aggressively is when the chips are stacked on high.

In golf lexicon, such card play might soon be referred to as the “Ram Jam.”

Situated amid the serene spread of SoCal’s 640,000-acre Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Rams Hill Golf Club in Borrego Springs — 90 minutes from Palm Springs and a shade farther from San Diego — has made burgeoning noise on the national scene in recent years, its horns in lockstep with the nation’s top public-access courses. The course on the come pushed its pile center table the past two years, going all in at a time when both stakes and magnification have been at their highest to-date for the Tom Fazio-designed grounds.

Stuck in a salty pinch with its water source, Rams Hill made the bold choice to endeavor a multi-year, multimillion-dollar regrass of its entire property. In 2023, the greens were converted from bentgrass to MiniVerde Bermudagrass and, a year later, in lieu of its annual winter overseed to ryegrass, the course took on a TifTuf Bermuda hybrid overhaul of all tees, roughs, fairways and surrounds.

In concert with staying open year-round for the first time, the aggressive conversion aims for a needed — and sanguine — sustainability/savings solution, with hopes that the drought-tolerant hybrid will save 25 percent water usage while also sating the grounds’ growing volume of guest expectation.

With one TifTuf peak-season in the books, the turf’s Ram Man, superintendent Willie Lopez, eyes the season ahead with an ambition matching the loft of the course’s growing tee sheet.

“I’m really looking forward to this next fall,” he says. In June 2024, “the grass wasn’t even four months old. Now, the grass will have had a full season. And from what I’ve seen in early summer from the TifTuf, it’s doing very well. Give it two years of this grass growing in and this place is going to be unbelievable. Little spots filling in, the rough coming in, everything perfect around the greens.”

Salty dogs don’t hunt

While Rams Hill was on potable well water under previous ownership, said parties sold such rights to the local water district upon their 2015 departure. In turn, current ownership drilled its own wells. Though they didn’t know as much at the time, the nascent source would put new Rams Hill brass on the clock.

“The ‘whys’ behind these conversions are multi-faceted,” COO and general manager Harry Turner says. “The water source that we have is such that it’s extremely high in sodium. And your soil, of course, really becomes what you put on it — i.e., the water. Over time, with this water — high in salt, high in bicarbonates — what’s left behind crystallizes, compaction and that causes the soil to seal up.”

Just as Rams Hill’s singular combo of desert solace and Fazio-drawn slopes were starting to enjoy a deservedly blossoming national audience, the grounds were evidencing some genuine wilt.

“We hit a tipping point in 2021-22, as we were trying to hydrate ryegrass with a substance that was actually poisoning it,” Turner continues, “and that made it almost impossible for the grass to mature. It would come up and germinate fine, but it wouldn’t tiler, wouldn’t spread. With the weather, the ecosystem, the water, the soil we had — we were basically trying to grow the wrong crop.”

With a cruel hint of irony, the grounds hit hardest were Fazio’s signature swales and studied collection areas. Those areas pooled with sodium traces and the withering winter ryegrass created an unwinnable agronomic challenge.

“The grass would germinate fine, come up, but after the second or third mowing it was, ‘What the heck? Is it getting fungus? What’s wrong?’” Lopez says. “We could see all the salt crystalizing and, next thing you know, it would just kinda die.”

Extensive research ensued, with Turner and Lopez turning to Dr. James Baird from University of California-Riverside. According to Turner, Baird called the situation, “The worst combination of water and soil I’ve ever seen — and I’ve seen a lot.”

Such reaction led to action. “When we brought in somebody with the knowledge and experience of Dr. Baird, and he threw his hands up, too, we needed to find alternatives,” Turner says.

A full regrass aside, Turner and team didn’t purview genuine optimism in their second option. “Really, the only other choice we had was to keep everybody on the cart paths and keep play at about 12,000 rounds a year,” Turner reflects. “And we can’t charge enough to keep play at that level to break even, much less make a profit. And to keep people on the paths? Who’s gonna come?”

Borrowing from alternate dreamy fields: If you rebuild it, they will come.

In step with the MiniVerde greens’ conversion in the summer of ’23, Rams Hill further performed a driving range change to TifTuf along the same timeline. Lopez also performed a singular TifTuf tee test on No. 16 for aesthetic study, leaving the tips non-pigmented, while painting the forward tees.

Between look and play, Lopez was fast won over by TifTuf’s play potential, along with his ability to keep appearance intact amid dormancy.

“We did the test first, starting with one tee,” Lopez says, “and then, when we did the driving range the following year with TifTuf, we started saying, ‘Oh, yeah, this is good.’”

From mid-May to mid-October 2024, machinery and manpower coalesced, as the golf grounds were stripped and pulverized nearly a foot down into the strong soil.

Due to depths of the pulver, the grounds required removal and ensuing replacement of nearly 3,000 sprinkler heads and swing joints by hand; as Lopez implemented a system of improved washers to mark heads, he and his crew would then go back with a metal detector to find their marks.

As for those hand digging? Rams Hill kept pro shop staff, servers, kitchen employees and outside service members working during the summer. “They manned the business end of a shovel and hand dug up all those heads,” Turner says.

With former Fazio protégé Tim Jackson of Jackson Kahn Design overseeing design elements of the work, the Rams Hill redux debuted just four months later and the property enjoyed a noticeable autumn bump. Between weather and pre-snowbird flocking, October proves a sneaky-great month for desert golf, especially considering that a heft of Rams Hill’s desert neighbors in Palm Springs are closed for overseed.

Along with a fall ascent, staying open year-round has Rams Hill brass planning for an annual round increase from 20,000 up to about 30,000.

Prepping for such volume, the course already has a few lessons learned and a few tests passed. While readying for a thorough summer drainage project — upwards of 1,000 feet of pipe — Lopez has fast mastered the look of the new grass, applying Ambient Plus pigment approximately every six weeks, done at studied intervals to ensure TifTuf aesthetic consistency.

“Our biggest fear with this grass was making sure it would stay green in the winter [peak season],” Lopez says. “But this grass, it’s getting more mature all the time. There’s still some tweaking that we have to do, but this is like growing in a brand-new golf course.”

Turner adds some self-deprecation when revisiting his thoughts on the tightness of fairways.

“When we started to reopen, Willie said, ‘What do you think about mowing the fairways at 0.500’’?’” Turner says. “I said, ‘Let’s make a swipe at 0.475, then another swipe at 0.450 and see what it looks like.’ Looked really, really good — until carts got on it.” He smirks. “So, this is a case of somebody who likes to think they know more about agronomy than they really do — me — influencing Willie more than I should have. The fairways were just too fast. That’s on me, and it’s a lesson learned.”

Lopez laughs and says, “We’ll start at 0.525 this next season. A little more protection, a little more cushion.”

Of more earnest reflection, Turner eyes an immediate rearview of pride, belief and enthusiasm on the Ram Jam big bet. “Did it take guts to do it? Probably. And was it a risk? Maybe. But I think the greater risk was doing nothing,” he says. “It was almost certain we were gonna have major problems that we were never going to be able to completely solve without doing something as dramatic as this.”