Here’s an example

Any similarity to real golf courses is purely coincidental

I recently happened upon a click-bait-y social media post that went something like: 

You’ve just arrived and paid the green fee for a bucket list round of golf. The person behind the counter says: “FYI: we just punched the greens.” What’s your reaction?

As you can imagine, the responses were equal parts ridiculous and entertaining. There was a lot of noise, but through the noise, there was also a strong signal: golfers don’t like aerification, or disruption to the putting surfaces. They don’t want to play with holes in the greens and playing over recent topdressing is only slightly more palatable. 

Our approach has been to reduce, or nearly eliminate the type of in-season disruptions golfers hate. The approach has been in play for four golf seasons and has worked wonderfully. With the exception I note below.

Yes, we’ve employed this approach at a private 18 hole golf club with a regular schedule of championship events, which may cause some to say: “yeah but…you’re at a private club with lots of resources.” Here’s the beauty of what we’ve been doing. It isn’t just for high budget courses. In fact, it is a program just as suited to low budget public courses packed from sunup to sundown, every day of the week. 

Imagine you’re at a golf course in Minnesota. You have a short, but very intense golf season. Your course is excellent, so every day the weather is even remotely good for golf, the course is packed. How do you find the time for Maintenance Monday work? You’re scratching and clawing for every minute, even mowing all the greens ahead of play is a challenge. Aerification? Topdressing? You might be looking at something like doing the work at night, or doing ⅓ of the course each week for three weeks. Or doing the work very early, or late in the season. None of the options are good.

As turf managers, these types of situations put us under pressure. We have a limited window of time, and such we might choose a process that is more aggressive, to make up for limited opportunity. We think: “I only have one window, so I’m going to do three times the work and really make it count.”

In the end, this 3x work is only likely to cause great consternation among our golfers, and here’s the kicker; if we are really using our data, we might not have had to do anything.

This appears to be a process healing well, but this was taken a month following the aerification.

I’ll use my own mistake as an example. Back in 2021, before all these ideas were fully cooked in my mind, I used an aerification process we had used four or five times previously. I was certain it was necessary and I was certain it was the best choice–it wasn’t. The healing time was extended far beyond my, or anyone else's expectation and it ruined what to that point had been a wonderful golf season. 

I made the decision based on what I thought was the right thing to do. I had most of the data I have today, but as I said earlier, I was only partially clear on how I might use that data to make decisions. I had a scheduling window, did something I thought we needed to do and it caused everyone a real problem. Under pressure and lacking data/knowledge, we are all prone to make bad decisions.  

What if you weren’t under pressure to perform a ‘vital’ cultural practice? What if you didn’t need to find that time? Or what if you could do that aerification procedure every other, or every third year? What if you never had to do a Maintenance Monday? What if you didn’t have to tell players: “we had our club championship last week, so we’re giving the greens a break this week.”  

What if the playing conditions from such an approach were better than when you were scratching and clawing for 30 minutes on a Monday? Crazy, right? No, not crazy!

Here’s how to make it happen:

• Start measuring the daily play conditions. I recommend a stimpmeter on multiple greens and I recommend pairing it with a Bobble Test smoothness rating. If you are getting the speed you want and the smoothness is good, don’t make that next topdressing app, let it ride and see what happens to the metrics. Micah Woods and I recently discussed this on an episode of his ATC Double Cut podcast.

• Measure and record the clippings removed by mowing. If it sounds daunting, pick a handful of greens to start; probably the same greens you stimp. If you aren’t sure how to get started, I’ve written a guide. Once you have your clipping numbers, you can use it determine the daily growth ratio, which will so you exactly how much your grass is growing.

• Keep track of how much nitrogen is going down. Be careful, some of the products you are using might have some N that isn’t accounted for. Better yet; buy some feed grade ammonium sulfate, or urea, melt it in water and use that as your only N source. Then, the next time you make a nitrogen app, use half of what you planned and see how the turf reacts. Even if you think your half rate is too small, do it. I regularly make applications with an N rate of 0.02 or 0.03 lbs/1000ft² (0.1 or 0.15 g/m²) and I still see the turf respond. 

• Keep track of how much sand you’ve applied.¹ I also recommend tracking this as depth, rather than by tons/area. It’s easy to measure and convert.

• Finally, start sampling for total organic material using the tOM246 method. This will tell you if using such an approach is having a negative impact below the surface. It’ll also tell you if you actually need to do some more disruptive work. Until you get to where you want to be, it is possible more work might be needed.

If you’re not testing and recording this kind of information, you’re flying blind. You’re probably doing more work than necessary and you’re definitely sending you golfers to social media to complain about their bucket list round being ruined by holes, or sand.   

1. We are about to apply our end of season topdressing. In a future post, I’ll write about how we measure and what the math looks like.