Call them an invisible armada. A total of 120 turf industry professionals were charged with seeing to it that Lancaster (Pa.) Country Club was fit to stage the 70th United States Women’s Open Championship.
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Todd Bidlespacher, the club’s director of golf course operations, Michael Yelenosky, the golf course manager, and their staff of 43 were joined by superintendents from other clubs, along with specialists from equipment and chemical companies who volunteered their time and expertise to give back to their industry and the game of golf. The all-star maintenance crew numbered approximately 120. They worked in shifts, so the maximum staff on duty at one time numbered somewhere around 100.
(Photos courtesy of Mark Jones/Lancaster Country Club)
“It was a total industry-wide effort,” says Darin Bevard, the United States Golf Association Green Section director of championship Agronomy. “You have former assistants that maybe worked on the golf course; they’re former employees, or you have people that are friends of the superintendents or various assistants. When you look at the makeup [at the Women’s Open], it speaks well to Todd and Michael and what people think of them that they want to be here to help out.”
The group had the task of preparing the course for play each day. Much of the work was done in relative obscurity, early in the morning and late in the evening when few if any players and spectators were on hand.
Any golf facility presents unique challenges for its grounds staff and Lancaster Country Club, a classic William Flynn design, is no exception. In several locations, multiple holes ran adjacent to or intersected with each other. On Thursday and Friday, the first two days of the championship, the first tee times were scheduled for 6:45 a.m. The morning maintenance schedule had to be formulated with precision.
“Your sequencing of maintenance activities had to be very particular,” Bevard says. “You can’t be on 15 green when you have players on No. 1 green. You have that working against you and then you have nine tee next to eight green. That was probably our biggest challenge, the sequencing of maintenance to avoid play.”
But weather became an issue when a thunderstorm swept over the property Thursday evening, prompting the suspension of play at 6:03 p.m. While the players were eventually permitted to warm up on the range, they never got back on the golf course that night. The suspension of play benefited the maintenance team, which had the task of clearing debris off the golf course; it was able to do much of its work Thursday evening in the daylight.
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“That allowed us to evaluate everything in the daylight,” Bevard says. “Even though we had to do some cleanup in the dark we got off to a good start in the daylight, when we could actually see what we were doing. If they had resumed play, we probably would have started maintenance in the dark on Thursday evening. It was an advantage that we had that time in the daylight.”
Approximately a half-inch of rain fell on the property during the storm. The course drained remarkably well, in part due to steps the club took prior to the championship to address that issue.
But when the crew went to work after the storm had passed, it was confronted with an abundance of debris on the putting surfaces. That debris had to be removed before play could resume.
“The biggest challenge was having to be out there getting all of the debris cleaned off the greens,” Bevard says, “sticks, twigs, and everything else. That was cleaned up so when we hit the ground early Friday morning we were ready to go; we didn’t have to worry about blowing off greens.”
Fifty-five players returned at 6:45 a.m. Friday to complete their opening rounds; the second round began a half hour later. “Essentially we had a 6:45 shotgun start Friday morning,” Bevard says.
That meant the entire golf course had to be prepared by that time, since there would be play on 14 of the 18 holes, Nos. 3-9 and 12-18. The solution? An early start. The crew arrived at 3 a.m. and the mowers were underway by 3:15 instead of the originally scheduled 4:30. Some members of the crew worked until close to midnight the night before but were back on duty in the morning. “Sleep deprivation is one of the challenges,’ Bevard says. “You just keep working through.”
The combination of rain and time constraints left the crew unable to cut the greens Friday morning and portions of the rough were left unattended. “[The weather] did not allow us to do evening maintenance on the putting greens for Round 2,” Bevard says. “Some of the players said the greens were slower. They were. But there wasn’t anything we could do about it.”
Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer and frequent GCI contributor.