Alamo City Golf Trail chief superintendent Brad Fryrear admits that Willow Springs Golf Course was in embarrassing shape in summer of 2009.
The fairways had more weeds than turf, the greens had recently been resodded after a worker killed the grass with a heavy application of pesticide, and an outmoded irrigation system had produced more bare spots than bermuda.
"Of all of them, it was in the worst situation," Fryrear said of the ACGT courses. "That one had dropped down a notch or two."
Enter Brian Woolard, 38, who only a few months earlier had been hired to oversee Mission Del Lago.
"I kind of left it to Brian to get it all working," Fryrear said.
Just more than a year later, Woolard's remarkable efforts at Willow Springs earned him recognition as superintendent of the year by the Central Texas Golf Course Superintendents Association.
"It just needed some tender loving care and some direction," said Woolard, an Alvarado native who didn't pursue a career in the golf industry until he discovered the superintendent degree program at Texas State Technical College in Waco. "I wasn't involved with what was going on previously. I just knew I could turn it around."
He did so by applying experience learned in more than a dozen years serving as an assistant on various properties statewide and what others around him term an extraordinary knack for identifying and treating trouble spots on the course.
Woolard, a golfer while at Alvarado High School southeast of Fort Worth, does so despite suffering from a form of cerebral palsy that has cost him some motor function on the left side of his body.
"It doesn't affect my brain," he said. "I do things. I just can't do it as fast as some."