|
|
After eight years at Pebble Beach Golf Links, four as golf course superintendent, Tom Huesgen, CGCS, found himself at a crossroads. On one hand, the prominent public course offered championship tournament experience, history and nostalgia, all with a dazzling view. But on the other hand, Huesgen believed time with his family was slipping away from him. He wondered if he could change direction without losing his career footing.
He looked for other superintendent positions, and learned about plans for a new course just outside Telluride, Colo. He inquired further, and discovered the course was to be part of a second-home community, where membership would be offered exclusively to homeowners along with family-style amenities. Cornerstone billed its golf course as “Golf for everyone.”
That was enough for Huesgen. In the spring of 2005, he signed on as golf course superintendent and moved to the mountains with his wife and two young daughters. Three years later, Huesgen has a new lease on life and is maintaining an 18-hole, 7,978-yard golf course he helped build from the ground up. It seems Huesgen made the right move, and his family, 35-man staff and the course aren’t the only ones reaping the benefits.
“Working at Pebble Beach started to conflict with what I enjoy – being outside, being one with nature, the tradition of the golf game and exposing it to everyone,” he says. “I’d probably still be there today if I hadn’t come across Cornerstone, but I wouldn’t be as good a person. I’ve learned a lot in life during the past four years. Somehow, some way, the light turned on and I realized I’m not living just for work. I’ve never looked back.”
The authenticity of Huesgen’s philosophy shows in the golf course he maintains. He’s worked to make Cornerstone playable at all skill levels. People walk away from the game of golf every day, he says, and they’re not country club members. They’re people who say the game is too difficult.
“We built this course to encourage those people to have a better time,” he says. “Maybe then they’ll introduce the game to one or two more people. It’s easy to make an easy golf course that everyone will score well on. It’s easy to make a challenging golf course that only a small portion of today’s golfers will enjoy. But it’s difficult to make a golf course good for everyone.”
It’s not something you can do on paper, Huesgen says. He and Matt Dusenberry, architect with Greg Norman Golf Course Design, which designed the course, spent years walking the golf grounds, scrutinizing each fairway, green and tee and molding the course to perfection.
|
|
Part of that perfection has included elaborate environmental considerations. Huesgen and his crew strove for a nonmanufactured golf course, going out of their way to retain the course’s natural features. Rocks and boulders that couldn’t be worked around were relocated to a new spot on the course. Cart paths were placed strategically out of sight along the contours of the terrain. And Cornerstone features a waste water treatment plant, which is the state’s first 100 percent reuse plant.
“Whether we’re applying wetting agents, or hardening the grass by getting it to adjust to using less water, or doing hand-watering or supplemental watering as opposed to watering an entire area, we’re taking every measure possible to use the least amount of water,” Huesgen says. “It’s probably one of the most naturalistic approaches you can take to putting in a golf course.”
Huesgen waters less than 100 of the course’s 300-plus acres with his irrigation system.
“We have hard lines – areas where turf is adjacent to native or wooded areas,” he says. “We’ve installed the irrigation to water only the areas where a golf ball would possibly be.”
Maintaining the irrigation system, and the turf itself, requires intensive care. Cornerstone’s fairways and rough are Kentucky bluegrass, while approaches, tees and greens are bentgrass – a change from Pebble Beach, where most tees and fairways are ryegrass and greens are Poa annua.
“We’re still in the stages of growing in the golf course,” Huesgen says. “We’ve got the golf course completed, but we also have areas we sodded in ’06, areas we sodded last year, and some areas we’re finishing up today. That’s three years of construction just in terms of the grassing part of it. It takes another two or three years to achieve consistency because we have such a short season. Our growing time frame is five and a half months, tops. We have to be diligent with what we do because we have such a narrow window of opportunity to make a difference.”
It’s this constant focus on making a difference – on the golf course and in his personal life – that’s led Huesgen to his present euphoria.
“I still pop out of bed every morning and can’t wait to go to work,” Huesgen says. “I’m still able to work hard and work on cool projects and construction. And yet I have seasons where there’s down time, and I’m able to take my kids to school in the morning and be there when they get off the bus. I’m able to do all the things I enjoy doing.” GCI
Front page photo: Stephen Collector
