Supers Hoping It Ain't So: Stimp Greens With The iPhone!

PACE Turf's Dr. Larry Stowell posts a video reviewing iStimp, the $0.99 iPhone application that lets golfers do Stimpmeter green readings on their phone. 

UNM Woes...$1.3 Million Maintenance Budget!?

Brad Klein fleshes out a few details about how the troubled University of New Mexico Golf Course is over $4 million in the red and the struggles can be attributed to a green fee and maintenance upgrade to compete with local upscale daily fees.

With green fees now set at $20-$39 for UNM students and $52-$70 for others, the course still runs an annual operating deficit of $400,000. The maintenance budget, including upkeep of the school’s on-campus nine-hole North Course, comes to $1.3 million a year. An aging cast-iron irrigation system, balky septic system and antiquated heating and cooling add maintenance “baggage,” Trujeque said.

Another Superintendent Comes To The Rescue

James Clark reports on at least the third to perform a rescue like this in the last year. In this case, a woman in her car in the lake on 15 at Lubbock Country Club.

Golf course Assistant Superintendent Greg Leach, discovered her about 8:45 a.m.  Leach was shocked to find a woman still in the vehicle, so he kicked off his boots and waded out to get her out of the vehicle.  He brought her to dry ground and then called the police.  Leach said she was conscious but was not making sense. 

"She was conscious. She was turning white, and she wasn't making any sense. She was trying to talk, but words weren't clear," said Leach.

"We want to continue to give the local folks a great golf course and also want to maintain our rating nationally."

Steve Lynn of New Mexico's The Daily Times looks at the revenue problems of the well-regarded Pinon Hills, the most blatant example yet of water costs impacting the health of a golf operation.

Meanwhile, the golf course is watering less despite spending more on the nonpotable water.

The course spent $42,000 on 134 million gallons of water in 2004.

By contrast, it spent $151,000 on 118 million gallons through October this year while spending about the same last year on $172 million gallons.

At the same time, the course has cut its budget. The city projected a $1.35 million budget that funds the city's golf courses this fiscal year, a decline of almost $90,000 from last fiscal year's budget.

The city expects higher green fees to raise revenue by $100,000, parks department director Jeff Bowman said.

"We want to continue to give the local folks a great golf course and also want to maintain our rating nationally," Bowman said.

"Golfweek" ranked Piñon Hills the No. 4 public golf course in the nation this year.

Naturally those last two sentences provide a nice reminder to those who don't think courses overspend to appease panelists.

GCSAA Cuts: "The economic recession, particularly in the golf industry, has been deep and severe."

James R. Fitzroy, Golf Course Superintendents Association of America President, writing to his members today after announcing significant staff cuts.

Dear GCSAA Members,

In recent years, my predecessors and I have shared with you the steps we have taken to ensure that GCSAA remains a viable and sustainable organization that delivers value to you, your facility and the golf industry.

The economic recession, particularly in the golf industry, has been deep and severe. Since 2008, GCSAA has reduced expenditures $5.4 million with the objective of having the least amount of impact on members as possible. Earlier this year, the GCSAA Board of Directors conducted an extensive strategic planning session to review our mission and vision, and chart our path for the upcoming years. Our responsibility as leaders is to keep GCSAA strongly positioned for the future by seeking new resources and optimizing the ones we have in order to execute programs and services on the members' behalf.

Therefore, today I am announcing a series of significant actions that will result in reorganization of GCSAA programs and services. Unfortunately, it will also result in reduction of staff. In the last three years, we have reduced staff from 122 to 85, so taking these additional steps places additional responsibility on those that remain. Working with interim CEO Rhett Evans, we will continue to focus on those areas we have deemed to be a priority. There is no denying that we will discontinue some activities and reduce the magnitude of others as we manage the association through this difficult period. But the reductions are also necessary to create the capacity to expand into areas of significant opportunity such as field staff, continued international expansion, advocacy/outreach and professional development, among others.

Goats Are The Future!

Julie Williams follows up with a story on the goats thinning native grass areas at Pasatiempo and shares this from Terry Hutchens.

Terry Hutchens, extension goat specialist at the University of Kentucky, notes that employing goats for brush clearing is a West Coast idea making its way east. But then, so are goats.

“It’s been used in the West for years, but east of the Mississippi River, it’s a phenomenon,” said Hutchens, who predicts that using goats for brush management (on golf courses or otherwise) will be common practice in 10 years.

For the past two years, Hutchens has been involved in a student research project that introduced goats to three landfills located on Bluegrass Station, a former Army base in Fayette County, Ky., now operated by the state. Groups of four goats first were released in quadrants slightly smaller than a half-acre to assess their land-clearing capabilities. The project was taken one step further when goats ended up at Avon Golf Course, a public nine-hole facility on Bluegrass Station, on a two-month trial basis.

"Golfers themselves deserve part of the blame for insisting that putting surfaces be mown short and fast even in weather conditions in which such practices are almost certain to ruin them."

John Paul Newport does a nice job explaining why super low mowing heights are not a good thing, especially in the extreme conditions that much of the United States has experienced this summer. Considering it's the Wall Street Journal, hopefully this reached a few influential types who've been after their superintendent for more speed.

Grass does have a mechanism to cool itself. It's called evapotranspiration and is analogous to perspiration. The roots draw up water from the soil and it evaporates through the plant's leaves, dissipating heat. But when greens are scalped to a quarter-inch, an eighth of an inch and even shorter, the leaf surface available for transpiration declines.

Prolonged heat causes other problems. One is that root systems shrink, sometimes to within a half-inch of the surface, reducing the amount of water drawn up to the top. Humidity and heavy rain make things even worse. Humidity retards evaporation, while soggy soil stays hot longer than dry soil does. Puddles and saturated soil also create barriers that prevent needed oxygen from getting to the roots.

TPC Sawgrass Maintenance Blog...

Thanks to reader Kevin for the head's up on Tom Vlach's TPC Sawgrass maintenance blog. Of particular interest are the images of the course just two months ago versus this week.

Sharp Park Gets Help From The PGA Tour!

Granted, it was done--as Ron Kroichick reports--by getting the Harding Park superintendent reassigned to Sharp Park and paying for their own guy to run Harding in order to get it ready for this year's highly anticipated Schwab Cup. But at this point, Sharp Park will take any help it can get.