Golfer Expectations For Bunkers: Still Silly After All These Years

The minimalist architecture movement has helped deliver many sustainable elements to golf maintenance, but it still has not made a dent in golfer expectations for perfect bunker lies.

The Fried Egg’s Garrett Morrison considers the importance of groomed hazards for golfers and the cost to the game through the eyes of USGA agronomist George Waters.

To avoid player complaints about bunkers, courses have to increase spending. In turn, green fees go up. This is a vicious circle that sometimes leads to closure.

“What I think would surprise many golfers is that there are definitely courses that spend as much—or even more—per square foot on bunkers as they do on greens,” George Waters told me. Waters is Manager of Green Section Education for the USGA and wrote Sand and Golf: How Terrain Shapes the Game. “And it’s golfer expectations that drive that spending.”

Just as pressing as financial issues, according to Waters, are opportunity costs. The more time greenkeepers devote to bunker maintenance, the less they have for other tasks.

“The list is basically endless,” Waters said. “For lower- and mid-budget courses, the extra time can make a big difference in improving conditions on greens, approaches, and fairways. That could be more time spent hand watering, more time making irrigation repairs, more time nursing weak areas back to health.”

The story notes that current wokester-darling Sweetens Cove treats all bunkers as waste areas, meaning you can ground your club and maintenance is not as diligent about daily rakings.

The golf course industry generally misses opportunity to make a show of how these things affect cost. Because I’m pretty sure we’d have heard by now of a course knocking 10-20% off their green fees for a week while bunkers go unraked. I’m pretty sure golfers would not mind, but then again, I forget how much people demand perfect lies in hazards.