 |
 |
|
The big move
Crossing transitional and cultural lines challenges
superintendents’ wanderlust.
|
Golf course superintendents’ peripatetic nature usually comes with a self-preservative level of comfort: Move about as they may, they never stray too far from their own element.
Of course, the profession being what it is, there are always a few among the itinerant many who venture afar — far enough to confront cultural shock, both agronomically and personally.
The foremost career-stretching breakaways are characterized by moving to or from warm- or cool-season turf and all the nuances thereof. To be sure, crossing the lines of transition brings many issues into play.
“Whether the move is north to south or south to north or wherever, the objective is still the same — keep it green, whether it’s bermudagrass or bentgrass or whatever.” That’s the common denominator expressed by Greg Moore, a Class A GCSAA member who left a decade of turf management in Ohio a couple of years ago for Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Steve Gano, vice president of International Golf Maintenance’s operations outside Florida, agrees, but, as one who keeps superintendents on the move, he prefers to play it safe for the most part.
|
||||||
“Most of our superintendents have a higher education background, and general turf principles are the same no matter where you go,” the former superintendent says. “That said, we don’t usually gamble and move someone to a climate with which they’re not familiar.”
Gano, a Class A member who’s been in GCSAA for 10 years, notes that in his experience while overseeing IGM management at courses in 14 states from the Deep South to New England to the West Coast, the issues that surface most in major regional moves by superintendents include length of season and wide differences in turf pests and diseases.
He adds that GCSAA’s certification procedures are integral to making such a move.
“That program has done a pretty good job of insuring that superintendents are well-versed about different climates in different areas,” says Gano, who has been with IGM seven- and-a-half years.
As the following case studies and excerpts from the experts show, the paths to change feature many twists and turns, and there’s much more to it than meets the eye.
North to South
Moore knows that keeping it green isn’t as simple as he makes it out to be, but as long-range goals go, he’s one of the best in the business. After a 10-year run at Liberty Hills Golf Club in Bellefontaine, the eight-year GCSAA member was weary of west central Ohio’s winters and headed south — way south — to take a job as superintendent of the North Course at Vineyards Country Club in Naples, Fla.
|
“It’s been a big change, especially from bentgrass to bermuda,” Moore says. “Their growing characteristics are very different, although the cultivation of both occurs in the summer.”
While the disease pressure that bentgrass faces in the North requires extensive use of fungicides and nitrogen fertilizers, Moore adds, southern turf management relies on less fungicides, more pesticides, and potassium and phosphorous fertilizers. Also, percolation balance, always a tough nut to crack, was indeed so in the clay soils of the North and still is in the sandy, porous ground of the South.
He notes that a good staff at the 36-hole club has been a big help, anchored by the director of maintenance, Jim Schleutker, CGCS, and the South Course superintendent, Tim Krueger, who have 28 years of GCSAA membership between them.
“I’ve been able to ask a lot of questions about managing bermuda and gotten the right answers,” Moore says.
It appears that when one tires of winter in the North, not even year-round course maintenance puts a damper on the warmth of the South.
“Up north, you’ve got basically three good months as far as the weather goes, and everything else is pretty much up in the air,” Moore says. “I definitely like managing the southern grasses, although I’ll have to admit you can’t get bermuda greens to run as fast as bentgrass. Even the ultra-dwarfs are too coarse. Mowed at the same height, the bent will
perform best.”
Mover beware
While Moore’s transition seems to be palatable, Grady Miller, Ph.D., a crop and soil sciences educator for nearly a dozen years at the University of Florida, says many superintendents making the north-to-south move should not be lulled into complacency by the nice weather and bermuda’s management-friendly forgiveness, tolerance and aggressive growth that sparks quick recovery from problems. There are issues, on and off the turf:
Non-stop golf. Leaving a six- or seven-month season for unrelenting year-round golf course management is often easier said than done.
“There’ll be people teeing off the day after Christmas, which is the only day off for most courses in the South,” Miller says. “In many cases, the highest golf pressure is during the winter and springtime when a northern superintendent would be used to little or no play.”
Pest pressure. The farther south you go, the more rampant the insects and nematodes ... and in some locales, alligators.
Overseeding. It’s ironic that twice a year, most southern superintendents deal with cool-season grasses in their overseeding programs — the August/September preparation and the springtime eradication — and often the added heat from players and ownership.
“That’s very disappointing to a lot of superintendents,” Miller says. “Just when the grass is looking good, you have to rip it up to overseed.”
Weed pressure. “Because the growing season is so long in the South, there are grassy weeds that people think of as being annuals that actually perenniate and continue to grow year-round,” Miller notes. “It makes a guessing game out of pre-emergents. It requires a different plan of attack.”
The weather. Tropical storms and hurricanes are givens and expected in many areas of the South, but the damage inflicted and ensuing clean-up are sobering to course management. Then there’s the heat, which Miller says can be the most major short-term adjustment in making the move. “It’s tough to work in and cope with; it takes a physical toll,” he says.
For Miller, there’s irony in all this. This summer he joined the faculty at North Carolina State — not really north, but north enough.
“I just seeded my yard with tall fescue ... the first time I ever planted tall fescue in my life,” he told GCM in September. “So, I’m experiencing that move and some of the issues are on my mind.”
South to North
Experience and cold, hard facts say leaving the South to brave the short but demanding golf season north of the transition zone and beyond is the most challenging move of all, say those who have lived it. A special mindset — a resolve — is required.
Kevin Frank, Ph.D., of the crops and soil sciences department at Michigan State University, says the issues pertinent to a south-to-north switch by a superintendent can be consolidated in cultural turns, personal and agronomical, and let the rest spiral out from there.
|
The climatic change in itself is literally a cold slap in the face — from turf-ravaging drought and disease-inducing heat and humidity to long months of ice, snow and freezing temperatures that may or may not lay waste to a hibernating golf course.
“To me, the biggest issue, if you’ve never been in the North, would probably be prepping the golf course for winter — the proper turf management, blowing out the irrigation and so on — and then coming out of winter in the early spring,” Frank says. “Waiting and worrying about winterkill can be a whole different kind of experience.”
Frank’s next concern for the Northern neophyte is the high level of disease activity that confronts cool-season grasses. Bentgrass, and at a lot of older Northern venues, the accompanying Poa annua, are vulnerable to a host of seasonal maladies. Most notable is when the likes of anthracnose, dollar spot, summer patch and others lump together to create dreaded “summer decline.”
“An increasing problem is that disease pressure on the cool-season grasses varies from year to year because of humidity, and we’re noticing that more and more, humidity is becoming a factor in areas where it hadn’t before,” Frank says.
On the plus side, the intense labor and agronomic pressures during the summer season subside considerably for a superintendent and staff when late fall and winter set in. Besides the downtime, many course projects can be done, barring prolonged deep snow cover.
Sweet home Canada
To summarize the relatively brief but frenetic career of Class A superintendent David May seems inadequate. The 36-year-old, 14-year member of GCSAA knows golf course management north to south and back again.
A native of the area around Toronto, Canada, May began humbly enough as a golf course worker in the early 1990s. He detoured around a series of dead ends and wound up in the States as an assistant and then as a superintendent in the Carolinas for a handful of years. He then went on a short hiatus with a Canadian computer software company that caters to golf course operations. His sales travels eventually led him to a struggling golf course project in Zachary, La. One thing led to another, as sales talks are apt to do, and before long, May was hired as superintendent of Copper Mill Golf Club in time to bring in the facility’s latter stages of grow-in.
May finally hit something close to the big time at Copper Mill. Golf Digest named the course its Best New Public venue in 2005. But May and his new wife, also a Canadian, longed for home, and with Copper Mill GC firmly on its feet, they headed back north.
A year ago, May found something on his home turf — the head superintendent’s gig at Lionhead Golf & Country Club in Brampton, just west of Toronto. After tending to bermudagrass and other warm-season varieties for most of his career, he was faced with learning the ropes on 300 acres of maintained cool-season grasses at a 36-hole, high-end public operation. The rest of his story is an educational primer of sorts.
“It takes about a year to learn the market, learn the property and learn who you can draw from as potential employees, as well as deal with coming from wall-to-wall bermuda to bentgrass greens, tees, fairways and bluegrass roughs,” says May, who did have some experience with summer management of bentgrass in North Carolina. “A big thing is the difference in recovery. You can beat up bermuda and it’ll grow back.
But bentgrass is constant vigilance, filling in divots, monitoring disease, managing the balance in watering and worrying about the grass in winter.”
He notes that keeping abreast of the diseases that affect bentgrass is a daily chore, and one that is hindered greatly by Canada’s regulatory process, which severely limits the range of turf-care products that can be used on the country’s golf courses.
“While in the States you might have several different fungicides at your disposal, here you have maybe two,” May says. “When you’re trying to rotate chemistries, as you’re supposed to, it gets very tricky.”
One lesson May learned was coping with the long daylight hours during the heart of Lionhead’s April 1 to Nov. 1 season.
“We had golf from 5:30 in the morning to 9 at night,” he says. “We worked a lot of hours, a lot of split shifts in the mornings and late afternoons. I think it would really be better to get a lot of people on the golf course and do all the maintenance at one time, then let the crew go home and keep key people on the rest of the day. A good staff is the key to a change like this; if you inherit a good staff, do everything to keep them. Surround yourself with good people, monitor the turf and stay on top of the disease pressures.”
Every which way
Doug Mohler, Class A superintendent at one of America’s more vigorous member-owned private golf facilities, Rogue Valley Country Club in Medford, Ore., has spent more than two decades criss-crossing the nation while pursuing careers in course maintenance and development.
Along the way, he has honed a unique perspective of golf course management in different regions of the country.
“Grass always wants to grow, wherever you are,” Mohler says, echoing Greg Moore’s common denominator. “Difficult seasons and pressures from members and owners are a reality anywhere, too. It all comes down to how well you prepare and deal with it.”
A graduate of Michigan State in the early 1980s, Mohler was a superintendent at courses in Ohio and upstate New York before embarking on an eight-year stint in golf course construction with companies like Landscapes Unlimited and Heritage Links, which brought him to nearly every corner of the U.S. and in between. His work included many projects in the early grow-in stages, such as sprigging, seeding and prep work and building relationships with grow-in superintendents. Basically, he saw what worked and what didn’t.
Valley Valhalla
But eight years in the construction sector was enough, and after taking some time off Mohler scratched an itch to get back into course maintenance while using his knowledge of what makes a golf operation tick. About three years ago he found the perfect place, Rogue Valley CC, a 27-hole venue in the high desert along the I-5 corridor just north of the Oregon-California border. The 80-year-old club virtually bustles, with 700 golfing members and 75,000 rounds annually. And, surprisingly, it’s a region previously undiscovered by Mohler.
“That’s what’s great about it ... I’ve never worked in the Northwest,” the 23-year GCSAA member says, noting that the layout sports bentgrass greens and ryegrass tees, fairways and roughs. “I’ve worked everywhere else. It’s been a unique opportunity. It’s allowed me to be in a totally different region, but with similar situations of a Northern golf course. But here we don’t fight the negatives of snow, we’re open all year and I can get a lot of projects done.”
The last several words of that comment is an All-American understatement. In his first year at Rogue Valley, Mohler directed a $3.2 million renovation that included a new wall-to-wall irrigation system and pump house, the rebuilding or remodeling of several holes and a new practice range, among other things. With Mohler’s background and expertise, a great deal of the work was done in-house. And since then, he estimates nearly 50 smaller projects have been done around the 212-acre property.
“The work we’ve done here came from my past experiences from around the country,” he says. “I had learned how to operate equipment properly and worked for the outstanding shapers in the industry. I learned to build greens by getting into the trenches with the people who knew how to do it best. I worked with some of the great architects and learned how to deal with people, how to sell a project, how to communicate.”
And yet, Mohler is quick to add that it’s really the people closest to you who make a major move work.
“I think the staff on hand when you come in is the most vital part of the deal,” he says. “I was fortunate, my assistant superintendent (seven-year GCSAA member Craig Hilty) was here when I got here. He’s from the region and he’s been a huge help to me. The staff on board is the key to success and survival. In my case, being in construction for eight years and then coming back to course management, I never realized how much I had to rely on my crew. You trust them, and once they understand you, they trust you.”
RECENT issues
 |
 |
October |
September 2006 |