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The temptation in times of economic downturn is to look outside our own experience for guidance. Maybe someone somewhere else has already dealt with this problem successfully, and maybe that will work for me?
Course superintendents specifically have formed for themselves a strong culture of professional knowledge sharing. This is a good thing when you’re dealing with a nasty grub or fungus. But it can be something of a trap when it comes to long-term planning and management of a golf course facility. And that’s exactly what all supers are being asked to do these days, ever more actively, as budgets get tighter.
Because we as architects and course builders travel from facility to facility, and have worked with so many courses over a period of decades, we offer a useful perspective about what’s really working elsewhere, and why. Course design issues are almost always long-term in nature. We learned a long time ago (in some cases, the hard way) that what works at Course A doesn’t necessarily mean it will work at Course B.
When something is working, and we want to find out how and why, we go straight to the superintendent. Not because they’re all geniuses (!), but because he or she knows that particular course best, understands the management structure best, and knows their particular golfing population best. When it comes to developing the most practical long-term plan for a club, it’s the superintendent who is best equipped to make that decision — and sometimes I wish supers trusted their abilities in this area a bit more.
It’s just too easy for some board member to learn of something happening at Course A and say, “Why wouldn’t that work here at Course B?” The super is still the best resource a club has to determine whether that’s the case.
A good example is staffing, which is one of the largest if not the largest line item on any course budget. In the service of design and course construction clients, we travel quite extensively around the Midwest. We see all kinds of different facilities, public and private, upscale and modest. The assumption is, the economic downturn has obliged superintendents to trim staffs across the board, but that’s really not what we’ve seen. Not everywhere.
Part-time staff has definitely taken a hit, but we see more and more superintendents thinking long-term and course-specifically about the best way they spread around what resources they have.
We’re talking with a northern Indiana club about doing a pretty extensive greens renovation (gassing and regrassing) and the superintendent there will keep on a sizable full-time staff through this winter and into next year as they prepare for the project. Carrying this labor load is not really new, he’s done it for years, but recently he’s bucked some criticism as budget pressures have increased at the club.
However, as the club plans for the greens project, the benefits of having this core group of highly trained guys has really been revealed. If and when we go ahead with the renovation, his staff will work directly alongside my course construction staff at Golf Creations. The familiarity and efficiency they bring to the project, which you just can’t get from a part-time crew, will bring down the cost of the project considerably. I understand carrying that kind of staffing level may still be impossible for many clubs, but for this club it’s proving to be an economical way to tackle specific long-term goals.
A little further west in Indiana, we’re talking to another club that’s considering its staffing issues in a completely different way. The super here recognizes that he doesn’t need to cut his labor crew (he can’t really!); he needs to cut what his crew does. So he’s asked us to prepare a scheme to take the course from around 90 bunkers down to about 45, or less.
It’s not as simple as just taking bunkers out, though, as the course is rather short by today’s standards (under 6,000 yards) and the numerous bunkers define much of the challenge. To his credit, the super fully realizes this, but push has come to shove in terms of his budget, of which bunker maintenance takes up a huge portion. With some unexpected capital dollars available to him next year, he sees this as a one-time chance to move the bunkers to more effective spots, reduce their size and quantity, and build them in a style more uniform and more efficient to maintain.
He’s hoping the long-term dollars saved can then be allocated for use in other deficient areas of his budget. I applaud this facility for facing a hard truth and creating a new, long-term working model that makes sense.
I think a lot of us in the golf industry spent a great deal of time over the last 20 years paying attention to maintenance and design initiatives that, to a certain extent, only we in the business notice: bunker styling, fairway contouring, tee corner squaring, and strategy to name a few. Just the other day, one of my architects was telling me his brother-in-law got invited to one of Chicago’s elite private clubs this fall. He came back and 95 percent of what the place is famous for was completely lost on this fellow. One comment he made that we chuckled at: “I think I made par on that RAY-don hole, or whatever they call it. Apparently that’s a hard hole.”
The golfing public, especially at daily fee and municipal facilities, doesn’t notice or care about a lot of this stuff. Will they notice if the second step-cut is eliminated around greens or fairway boundaries are narrowed to save on chemical usage? Doubtful. Will they throw a fit if the sand edges are big ovals and not sculptured? I suspect not.
The trick is identifying those course qualities they do notice — like dead grass on a shaded green or tees beat up with divots — and prudently allocating resources toward them. It’s called picking your battles, and the superintendent is almost always the best person to pick them — not because of what he learned somewhere else, or because he spoke to a colleague about them, but because he’s got his finger on the pulse.
At a club nearby our office in northern Illinois, they have a bentgrass/poa mixture in all the fairways, on all the greens. The amount of poa is significant, and when I’ve brought golf industry types out to play the course we inevitably talk about “solving” the poa problem. But that’s a step the club would never be likely to take. Why? Well, cost is a factor, of course, but also because the members really don’t recognize it as a problem. The greens play consistently, set up firm and roll true. And that’s because they’ve invested the resources — i.e. aeration, drainage, sand top-dressing, tree clearing — to manage them despite the poa. In essence the superintendent picked his battle and, most important, the members support his cause.
Any super knows the latter is not always the case. Our gassing-regrassing project in northern Indiana was necessitated by a membership that didn’t understand the perils of that particular course’s green issues. They didn’t get it, or more accurately chose not to get it, until a few greens failed. The superintendent there knew the dangers and, though he had made efforts to inform the membership, sometimes it takes a near catastrophe to get people to listen.
As we all know, not all superintendents are allowed to wield the power they should over decision-making. We’re working with a municipal course client around here that is junking its ryegrass fairways and converting to bentgrass. I’ll never forget when that idea was sprung. I was on site with a member of the USGA Green Section, and we both went, “Huh? A muni going to bent, in this economy?”
Turns out the super and director of golf had been compelled to make this conversion by their Board, which is convinced it will better compete for golfers with other privately owned, bentgrass daily fees in the region. I hope they’re right, and they just might be. They have some things to overcome, though. The drainage isn’t great, top-dressing is an additional cost that will prove burdensome, and none of the equipment they have is suited to bent maintenance (another potential budget-buster). But the superintendent knows this better than anyone.
You gotta pick your battles, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll always win them.
About the author
Bob Lohmann is founder, president, and principal architect of Lohmann Golf Designs, Inc., Bob provides hands-on leadership and management of all LGD projects. Since its founding in 1984, Lohmann Golf Designs, Inc. has enjoyed tremendous growth under Bob’s leadership, and great success in both renovation and new golf course projects. You can follow his BLOG by CLICKING HERE.
