Guy Cipriano
In the unyielding quest to complete projects as effectively and efficiently as possible around year-round play, Myers Park Country Club turned to a versatile piece of equipment with a canine-inspired name.
The club added the Toro Dingo TX 1000 Wide Track to its maintenance operations to help with sod and drainage products. The TX 1000 is a compact utility loader with the ability to implement attachments for soil cultivation, power raking, tilling, trenching, leveling and numerous other tasks.
Myers Park initially rented TX 1000 because of its ability to assist with sod preparation, says director of golf course operations Scott Kennon. The more Kennon’s team used the machine, the more potential ways they discovered it could improve the quality of the golf course.
“We used it to prep a bunch of sod areas,” Kennon says. “It has an attachment with a rotating device that tills up the earth and it just does a very good job of grading turf ahead of sod going down. So, we kept renting it. You spend X amount of dollars renting it and after a while you say, ‘By now we could have bought one of those things.’ Then you have another project where you are putting in drainage and you’re using this skidsteer and this gigantic trencher, and it’s way too big for the project and making a mess out of everything. You go, ‘The Dingo has a trencher. It’s a lot smaller. It would be perfect for this job.’ Landscapers use them all the time, sports field folks use them all the time, so why wouldn’t a golf course use it?”
Receiving approval to add TX 1000 into the capital improvement budget represented a multi-year process for Kennon.
“We proved the need,” he says. “Whenever you can prove you need something — and especially if you can get your hands on a piece of equipment and do a sample project — that always helps. We were able to do some drainage work with the rental Dingo and some sod prep work, and actually take pictures and show how effective it was and how much better the result was.”