| Golf industry leaders in Georgia have instituted two new awards recognizing environmental stewardship with one aimed at creating bonds with entities outside the game. The new Georgia Golf Environmental Foundation “Environmental Leader of the Year” awards further reaffirm and highlight the Georgia golf industry’s commitment to the environment. One award will be given to a golf course superintendent each year and another will be made in an open category. “I think in golf we’ve made a lot of progress in talking amongst ourselves about environmental stewardship, now it’s time to go out into the public,” Tim Cunningham, foundation chairman and certified golf course superintendent at Coosa Country Club, says. “The award in the open division is specifically designed to help us reach out and build bridges. By recognizing someone else’s commitment to environmental stewardship we have a wonderful vehicle to start conversations that will help those folks discover more about golf’s dedication in that realm.” The superintendent category of the awards recognizes excellence in overall course management excellence in resource conservation, water quality management, integrated pest management, wildlife and habitat management, and education and outreach. Additionally, those categories will be judged on sustainability, influence, originality and the use of technology. Similar criteria will apply in the open division. Both awards will be presented at a special “Night on the Green Carpet” during the Georgia Golf Course Superintendents Association’s annual meeting in November. The awards are another major step for the foundation which recently signed PGA Tour star and major champion, Stewart Cink, to serve as its ambassador. In that role, Cink has already been quoted in Sustainable Golf Practices, a nationally distributed electronic publication produced by the Environmental Institute for Golf. In that publication, Cink urged golfers to recalibrate how they judged golf course quality for the sake of the environment and the economics of the game. “To me, the average golfer puts way too much emphasis on greenness,” he said. “They should be worried about the way the course feels and performs, not the way it looks. In this economy, a lot of golf courses are having a hard time making ends meet. Using less water, less fertilizer, doing less mowing, all these things really contribute to the economics of them being able to survive.” Nomination forms for Georgia’s “Environmental Leader of the Year” awards are available at www.ggcsa.com and www.ggefound.org. Georgia Golf Environmental Foundation executive committee members and the Georgia GCSA president and vice-president will consider nominations with final selections made by the foundation board of trustees. |