The article below was written by Steve Carroll of National Club Golfer.
It’s the first thing many golfers will talk about when they’re in the clubhouse. It can define whether they enjoy their round or not.
Of course, we’re talking about greens. Members and visitors want them to be great, but do we have any idea of the costs involved in producing good turf?
For Your Course, produced by the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, we [National Club Golfer] spoke to three course managers from across the UK to understand how they overcome common problems that arise on golf courses during winter.
This week, we’re asking about the costs of preparing a golf green and what we all need to understand about the speed of our putting surfaces.
Tackling those questions are greenkeeping veteran Andrew Laing; Caroline Munro, head greenkeeper at Bonar Bridge and Ardgay; and Rob Sandilands, course manager at Formby Ladies.
How much does it cost to maintain a golf green and keep them to the standard you want?
Rob: It’s a reasonable amount, but the whole premise of what we’ve tried to do around fine grasses is to make it as sustainable as possible.
There are certain things – from a links point of view – where if you can spend money on quality products then you should. Grass seed, wetting agents, certain high quality organic based fertilisers, or products that work well and have the longevity you need.
Links managers would probably put our faith in quality wetting agents and grass seed, more than anything, and a good wetting agent programme nowadays costs a lot of money.
Caroline: My budget for the year is £3,000 and pretty much half goes on the greens. My general running costs – fuel, fertilisers, hand tools, maintenance of the machines – we try to keep within that.
I have got a great relationship with other courses. Tain are using a different feeding system this year so I got all their old stock for £500 and that will pretty much do me for the next three years.
Skibo have given me their hole cups and pins. I’m getting 18 and I’m only using nine. I’ll get another two seasons, maybe three, out of that so it’s another six years’ worth of stuff. St Andrews were getting rid of their tee markers. They’re very good to me.
Andrew: That is a really difficult question to answer because there are so many variables – whether we’re taking into account labour or the actual physical cost of materials and machinery. We invest heavily in our greens.
Gaudet Luce is relatively young. They are 30 years old this year and I was course manager for 21 of those. In the early days I made the decision, ‘what keeps golfers coming back?’ While the rest of the course was fairly immature, I thought, ‘if the greens are good, people will come back and forgive an awful lot of other sins’.
That’s something I maintained throughout all those years – to invest significantly in greens and their maintenance and upkeep, both in time and materials and whether that be sand, fertilisers, bio-stimulants and all the other things we can use. You play 50% of your round on a green and putting is when you notice it the most.
What do golfers need to understand about green speeds?
Andrew: I focus less on green speed and more on smoothness and consistency so that any one green is similar in pace to any other on the golf course. We don’t regularly monitor green speed. We don’t take regular readings. We never, ever, publish them.
I don’t think it is something I’d like to get into because, to the average golfer, it doesn’t mean anything. A Stimpmeter reading of 10 probably doesn’t mean anything and, to those that it does, they can wear it as a badge of honour.
I don’t want to go down that route. It does vary throughout the year for us. When we have big events on, or club championships, we might change our practices a little bit more to increase the green speed. That could be a bit of extra rolling or a slightly lower height of cut for a day or two. But green speed is not something I really focus on.
Rob: I absolutely agree with that. It’s a risky business if you’re one of those places that are going to publicise green speeds on a daily basis.
That would be pretty challenging. I think the green fees alone in this part of the world are pressure enough on course managers and their teams. Smoothness and trueness. How is the ball rolling? That’s what it is all about. Putting a number on it probably only really has its place if you’re producing surfaces for tournament play or tour play.
Caroline: If you have the staff to cut and roll, that’s fair enough, but golfers moan when you do aeration – it’s like you’re deliberately ruining their enjoyment of the greens.
They will go, ‘your greens are amazing, why have you done that?’ Well, it’s because of the cutting and the rolling and the compaction. You have to alleviate that.
They don’t understand the process of relieving compaction has to be done. I think there are some unrealistic goals. They see places like Augusta and Pebble Beach, and all these other places, and it’s all about being green and they don’t realise the input that’s going into these things is just unattainable for most places.
I don’t do any of that [taking data, looking at moisture levels]. They are what they are. There’s nothing more I can do.
I’ll scarify them and stuff like that to try to help before a big competition –to speed them up a bit – or a double cut. But knowing how fast they are is not going to make any difference to how I treat them because I can only do what I can do.
We’ve got greens that are exposed. We’ve got greens that are shaded. I think it would be pretty much impossible to get all my greens stimping at the same anyway. I try and get them as close as I can.
