A golf course superintendent manages and directs the maintenance, management and operation of golf courses. They conduct routine inspection of equipment and vehicles to ensure productivity and safety of the facility.
It's just nice manners. You'll find most will be open to listening to some tunes. On the heels of asking for their blessing, inquire about the type of music they might find agreeable. Yacht Rock, Motown, and Classic Rock are universally acceptable.
Things can get noisy if the home is very close to the course. This is especially true if the house borders a tee box or cart path. These locations are often golfers gathering spots and can be noisier than other locations. Before you buy, take time to walk the property lines and understand the course layout.
Profitable golf courses are generally selling for six to eight times EBITDA, while courses that aren't profitable tend to sell at 0.8 to 1.4 times revenue.
Rule 14-3 covers "artificial devices" and holds that using headphones or earplugs to tune out noise or distractions is a no-go, under penalty of disqualification.
Any device or sound that helps with your tempo and timing is illegal. Our golf music was created to use while practicing or driving to the course before you play golf. Although you can use it on the course, it is best for practicing.
Golf course communities tend to be tight-knit neighborhoods, making them highly sought after. It is also considered prestigious to live in this type of neighborhood. People enjoy living in these communities, so not only will you likely sell your home quickly, but you may also receive top dollar for your property.
The most obvious drawback to living on a golf course is the constant activity behind your home if you live directly on a fairway or green. There are busy parts of every neighborhood, but few involve golf carts and a steady stream of people as early as 5 a.m. on every possible day the weather allows it.
One of the biggest concerns you may have living next to a golf course is a golf ball landing on your property. While small, golf balls can cause big damage. You can up your home insurance coverage, but that will lead to a higher monthly premium.
Golf Course Owners make between $30,000 to several hundred thousand dollars per year. However, golf course owners sometimes will lose money if the course has a bad year. Overall, the golf course industry is very volatile, and there is no guarantee that money will be made.
“This means an 18-hole course of all short par 3s could be built on as little as 30 acres, while an intermediate length or executive course of 18 holes of par 3s and 4s would require 75-100 acres, and a full size par 72 course would need 120-200 acres.
Depending on the location of the golf course and the climate, an 18-hole course can use on average 2.08 billion gallons of water per day. Depending on the amount of water needed, a typical golf course can spend between $7,000 and $108,000 per year.
By any measure, Dave Wilber is an expert in turfgrass. He started working on golf courses when he was 15. At 21, he became a superintendent in Denver. At 24, he took a job in Northern California and instituted one of the first fully organic golf-course maintenance programs in the country at Lake Wildwood Country Club, a quiet second-home community at the base of Donner Pass. That was in 1990, half a decade before sustainable golf became an industry trend.
Jason Haines, 34, the superintendent at Sunshine Coast Golf & Country Club northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia, has felt the stress and anxiety of his profession for as long as he has been in the business. For him, it’s a particularly seasonal phenomenon. For six months of the year, the weather is cool and rainy, and stress is low. But every July and August, when the temperature and humidity rise to critical levels, placing his greens in jeopardy, his anxiety also rises.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 30+ years playing or working on golf courses, it’s that I’m never done learning. It’s impossible to know it all, and it’s an industry where change is constant. But, there are a few things I’ve witnessed throughout my time about superintendents and what makes the best ones.
While most Superintendents have general plans for what activities need done by their team and when, cultural practices or chemical applications for example, they may be too operationally based and forget to plan for the future. “I have no additional funding so no need to plan until I do.” That’s the wrong attitude.
In your every day life you hear this old adage often, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” And it makes a hell of a lot of sense the older you get. The little details often don’t matter in the long run. But it’s not the same on the course. A successful golf course is made that way from extreme attention to detail and polish.
There are two kinds of people in any job. The kind that like to chat up every customer or co-worker they pass and the kind that keep their heads down and minimize the distractions that are keeping them from accomplishing what they need to. If you are that latter type, you need to work on keeping that head up.
There are plenty turfgrass experts who don’t give a hoot -or a tweet- about social media (or email for that matter). Who needs all that extra nonsense? Well, the problem is, it’s not nonsense to most of the world, and actually quite valuable to the club, the golfers, and the super themselves.
When it comes to mother nature, and her many secrets and surprises, we are no match. No matter how long you’ve been running a course, soil and turf issues can come up that you’ve never seen before. You’re running the show and don’t want your expertise to be doubted or authority to be undermined, and humility can be hard.
Ever try to read the yardage on a sprinkler head only to see that it’s overgrown with grass? That means the grounds crew is behind on its edging, the regular practice of trimming shaggy turf from where it shouldn’t be (edging cart paths is another routine practice).
Like barbers snipping hair in different styles, supers mow their fairways in different patterns, from checkerboards and stripes to half-and-half configurations, with a line down the center and the grass on either side a different shade of green. Exactly how they do this is a subject worthy of a separate column. But there’s skill involved.
This is a job that puts the “pain” in painting, which is why you rarely see it outside of high-end clubs. Never mind the paint itself, which gets costly (around $200 for a 12-can case, Guilfoil says). You also need a special spray nozzle that works upside down.
Not all birdies on the course are good. Some peck at greens in their search for grubs. Others carpet-bomb the grounds with their droppings. At Desert Canyon, a single flock of geese wings in every year, like clockwork, and Guilfoil shoos them off the same way every time: by driving at them, full speed, in a cart.
Don’t even get Guilfoil started on all the other touchups, like filling pitch marks with green-tinted sand, or cosmetically repairing browned-out patches on the course with a coating of green dye. Then there are tee markers, trash bins and cart path signage.
A golf, food and travel writer, Josh Sens has been a GOLF Magazine contributor since 2004 and now contributes across all of GOLF’s platforms. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Sportswriting. He is also the co-author, with Sammy Hagar, of Are We Having Any Fun Yet: the Cooking and Partying Handbook.
It is impossible to say exactly why course care etiquette has declined, but this is not a new issue. It is unlikely that one solution will solve the problem, but education needs to be part of the process. Education can help golfers understand why they may be incon- venienced by cart restrictions or how replacing their divot can really help the golf course. Furthermore, education requires more than simply telling golfers to obey cart restrictions or repair a ball mark. Providing specific directions and the rationale behind them will clarify your expectations and their responsibilities. The reasons are common sense to those of us in the turf maintenance industry, but not to the average golfer. There will always be unraked bunkers, unrepaired ball marks and divots, and complaints about cart restrictions. This does not mean that we do not keep trying to make golfers more aware of their impacts on the golf course through education. We are in the information age, and we do not want to do some- thing because we are told. No, we want to know why we should do some- thing. The reasons are important to us. Educated with the right information, we are all more likely to do the right thing. Golfer etiquette is no different. The importance of caring for the golf course needs to be stressed to the average golfer. Don’t be confused: This is not a plea to help the mainte- nance staff or make the superinten- dent’s job easier. Their job is to prepare the golf course for daily play. It is the obligation of golfers to understand their responsibility to one another and to the golf course during a round of golf. That perfect lie that you had in the bunker? Make sure you recreate it for golfers playing behind you. Shouldn’t golfers that play behind you enjoy the same conditions as you? If everyone followed through with proper golfer etiquette, we’d all enjoy better golfing experiences. With that said, here’s to leaving the golf course in as good condition as you found it — or better!
The most important playing surfaces on any golf course are the greens. In the current era of putting green man- agement, ball marks often are the most noticeable blemishes on greens, and they create a lot of conversation. I do not feel that golfers are repairing ball marks any less (or any more) over time. Golfers generally make the effort to repair ball marks, although a gentle reminder about the importance of repair is good practice. When greens are firm, golfers have greater difficulty finding their ball marks because the ball often comes to rest far away from the point of impact on the green. When greens are softer, ball marks are more severe but easier to find. Remember that even a properly repaired ball mark created under soft conditions may leave a damaged spot for several days that negatively impacts appearance and playability.