fe ature ◗ Bruce Constable
A Line in the Sand Woodside Golf Club’s journey to reclaim its bunkers
The results of a year-long project to remake the bunkers at Woodside.
34 greenMaster | www.golfsupers.com
◗ Everyone who works as a golf course superintendent or assistant superintendent wears a lot of hats. On any given day we are teachers, accountants, mechanics, irrigation repair technicians, spray technicians and so on. In order to succeed in all those roles, the turfgrass manager needs to be an excellent communicator. Communication, in the form of conversations, is constantly taking place with staff members as well as customers. Most of the good, intense conversations between some of the golfers and I at Woodside Golf Club in Airdrie, Alberta, revolve around the length of the rough, the pin locations and the condition of the bunkers. Surprisingly, the speed of the greens doesn’t get a lot of lip service, so I suppose people are either happy with the conditions or just plain speechless. Of course, if all of the above are in adequate shape, the ball washer odour can become an issue. I have one member who likes to have a conversation with me on a daily basis and when the ball washer smell comes up, I give him a big smile and a high five, knowing that things are pretty good at Woodside. Like every other golf course on the planet, we have high expectations from the customers and we enjoy the challenge of trying to meet these expectations. We maintain the golf course with a fairly small staff, comprised of five full-time and five part-time seasonal employees as well as a mechanic, an assistant superintendent and myself. The key to our success is getting 100 per cent out of every person with a synergistic approach where everyone does everything and everyone helps everyone. All the employees are taught to multi-task. Those that are moving along quickly during the morning preparations will often double back and help the slower crew members. The entire operation spends a lot of time on customer service training, with the goal of providing the best day ever for everyone at the golf course. For everyone to have
the “best day ever” we need to make sure that our house is in order and this includes daily bunker preparations.
In the olden days
At a recent Alberta Golf Superintendent’s Association conference, “Jungle” Jim Hunter, in his very entertaining keynote address, said it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. This means, you only get out of something what you put into it. Guilty as charged. In past years, we have been doing a minimum amount of bunker maintenance and focussing our labour on other areas of the golf course. Don’t get me wrong, the condition of the bunkers was adequate, but not spectacular. The bunker maintenance programs were pretty good, but there was plenty of room for improvement. I know some superintendents, such as Keith Blayney at the Edmonton Petroleum Club, have software that tracks hours spent on various tasks and it is not uncommon to spend more hours on bunker maintenance than putting green maintenance. I am certain this is the case at Woodside, although I don’t track my labour to that degree. We have always committed to daily raking and the addition of new sand every season, but a bona fide edging program never materialized. Along the edges, the sand was pulled up to the grass and a quick edging was done with Roundup several times each season.
Time to kick it up a notch
In 2012, we had a bunker epiphany and set out to reclaim the edges that were a little obscure after years of neglect. This process, although very painstaking, elevated everything to the next level and helped accentuate the overall course conditions. At Woodside GC there are 18 holes, 55 bunkers, two sand pros and six to 13 maintenance workers on any given day. Everyone, including my mechanic John MacKeeman and my assistant Brent Lees, participated in the morning preparations and after the course was ready for play