During his more than four decades as a golf course superintendent, Sam Samuelson has never ventured very far for very long. He might have stepped away from his work for two weeks, tops, for a vacation.
That was, at least, until the continuing COVID-19 pandemic surged into every corner of every life.
Samuelson is the superintendent at WildHawk Golf Club, a daily fee-course about half an hour southeast of downtown Sacramento, California. He is also 65 years old and considered to be square in the target demographic for those at the highest risk of contracting and suffering from the virus. He has not stepped foot on the WildHawk grounds in more than five weeks. He has also not missed a step.
Samuelson has been running his crew from home for the last five weeks, a story he shared earlier this week during the most recent GCSAA COVID-19 town hall webinar. Tens of millions of American workers have carried on from their living rooms or dining rooms, but how many golf course superintendents are working from home? Samuelson is one member of an incredibly small group. “It has been interesting,” he says.
Before he headed home, Samuelson grabbed his work laptop, loaded with a handful of key apps, along with his 2020 wall calendar and some recent log books. He carved out a corner and designated a home office. “If I was going to run this from home,” he says, “I had to set it up so I had a rhythm like I have at work.”
Samuelson keeps his regular schedule, calling his crew for meetings at 5 a.m. each morning, then checking his emails before calling up to the clubhouse around 6 a.m. Instead of hopping in a cart to drive around the course, he calls and texts crew members throughout the day. It is imperfect but it works.
The course is busier than ever — averaging about 300 rounds per day since reopening earlier this month, compared to about 175 to 200 before shutting down. “Golf is in high demand,” he says, “because people can’t do a lot of other outdoor things safely.”
Samuelson is not the only member of the WildHawk maintenance crew not on the course. There are a couple others, he says, who are also in their 60s and have been staying home. Their health — their life, really — is far more important.
“You have people coming to work for you,” he says. “They’re putting their health at risk, they’re putting their family’s health at risk. Say thank you. And then say thank you again.”
There are so many unique stories in the industry right now. Every superintendent is dealing with different details and different challenges. The number of open courses has exceeded 50 percent. Some never closed, some are in varying stages of reopening, some are thriving. During another GCSAA town hall webinar earlier this month, National Golf Course Owners Association CEO Jay Karen indicated the difference between survival and shutting down could be whether the course was closed at all. Uncertain times.
What is certain is the ingenuity of superintendents.
At Legends Club in Prior Lake, Minnesota, Scott Thayer described his last six weeks as “a roller coaster.” Governor Tim Walz issued the statewide stay at home executive order on March 25, with only essential workers permitted at their workplaces and offices. Course maintenance was not considered essential.
Thayer and other superintendents around the North Star State were required to complete a deed to be added to the essential list. They also worked with the Minnesota Golf Association’s allied associations to contact legislators to allow maintenance. But nothing was passed quickly.
Those early shuttered days were beautiful, Thayer says, and “we could have gotten a lot done.” Instead, courses were closed for maintenance until the afternoon of April 8 — more than two full weeks — and, of course, an Easter Sunday snowstorm followed four days later.
The next hurdle arrived around noon on April 17, when Thayer and other Minnesota superintendents learned courses would open to golfers — the next morning. The tee sheet filled up in less than half an hour. Thayer mobilized his skeleton crew of three others “to do as much as we could do” in the remaining five or six daylight hours. At one point, Thayer headed to Walmart for supplies, including a pool noodle for cups. There were none, so he borrowed one from his children, cutting it up into 18 chunks.
The last two weeks have been happy but hectic. Thayer has been clocking in each of his crew members on his computer to cut down on the number of touchpoints, staggering lunches, sanitizing equipment before the day begins and limiting equipment — including carts for players — to a single person. “I hate seeing four golf carts and four guys,” he says, “but we all make our sacrifices. They’ve made it work with the golf carts. We’ve had to get 10 extra golf carts in. It’s been a full tee sheet almost every day.”
Mark Jordan has witnessed even fewer golfers on the course than Thayer. As the natural resource leader at Westfield Country Club in Westfield Center, Ohio — a club owned and operated by Westfield Insurance — he helped make the decision to keep the club closed after Governor Mike DeWine announced the state’s initial shelter-in-place order March 22. Golf courses could remain open, but Westfield Country Club would be closed through April 30.
“We didn’t want to play ping-pong about whether we were opened, whether we were closed,” Jordan says. “We had 45 days to develop a plan, and we wanted to develop a golf course opening plan and a plan for all of our employees to return to work.”
Like so many other courses, Westfield Country Club is asking golfers to arrive 15 minutes prior to their tee time and depart immediately after the round, with tee times scheduled for every 20 minutes. Carts will not be allowed. Among the notable differences is that the earliest tee time is 9 a.m. and those first spots on the sheet are reserved for golfers 60 and older.
Jordan is also staggering the size of his crew and the scope of his maintenance over the next month. He worked with only eight fulltime employees through April 28, then added eight part-timers on April 29 and will add 10 seasonal workers who have previously worked at the club on May 15 and 14 more seasonal members new to the club in late May. Maintenance, in turn, will be ramped up from the bare minimum in April to early spring standards in mid-May and the full standard from mid-May through late September. “We want to identify what’s working and what isn’t working,” Jordan says. “It gives us an opportunity to react.”
At Traverse City Golf & Country Club in Traverse City, Michigan, superintendent Steve Hammon is expanding the definition of flexibility, affording his crew the opportunity to work whatever hours work for them — in line with both social distancing and caring for family. Need to work only mornings? Only afternoons? Need to squeeze a week’s worth of hours into three or four days? Go for it.
The only parameters to the flexible schedule — which will likely work far better for smaller crews — is that hours must be clocked between 5 a.m., when Hammon’s mechanic arrives, and 5 p.m., when Hammon leaves for the day, and that the hours count at the end of the week still needs to be 40.
“With only three hourly employees,” says Hammon, the 2020 Golf Association of Michigan Superintendent Award of Merit winner, “it’s pretty easy to watch each other.”
The crew will peak around 15 in the summer. “We’re going to keep it clean,” Hammon says, noting that he started wearing a mask during his personal hours in mid-April and that he should have started wearing one at the course around the same time. “It’s out there.”
Kevin Sunderman would prefer at least one mulligan, too. The superintendent at Isla Del Sol Yacht and Country Club in St. Petersburg, Florida, Sunderman reduced weekly hours for his staff at the start of the pandemic, from 40 to 30. Had he known then how long the pandemic might last, he would not have cut back so soon, “because now I can’t add those hours back,” he says.
Sunderman schedules no more than half his staff at any one time, in part to cut down on the amount of time employees are around others, and in part to operating with economic responsibility and not lay off anybody. “From Day 1, we have made safety our No. 1,” he says. “We were going to do whatever was required to provide a safe environment for everyone here.” Meetings moved outdoors, virus education was incorporated, and everybody learned for the first time since probably elementary school exactly how to wash their hands — “something we maybe took for granted,” Sunderman says.
“If you put your hands on it, as soon as you put it down, you disinfect it. Before you pick it up, you disinfect it,” he says. “Did you clean every doorknob? Did you clean every light switch? Did you wipe down the refrigerator handle? If you touched it, is it clean? If you breathed on it, is it clean?”
The course is modified, too. Flagsticks are wrapped with streamers, divot sand is long gone, carts are sanitized and not even golfers who live together are permitted to share one. “I don’t want to be part of the reason golf is not allowed in the state of Florida,” Sunderman says.
Nobody wants that.
Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.