Day Trippin’

At Turtle Creek, The Grass Is Always Greener

An Emphasis On Conditioning Has Kept Golfers Coming Back For More

By Tom McNichol, Contributing Writer

Even early in April with the golf season in the Philadelphia area just getting started, you can take a drive to Turtle Creek Golf Course in Limerick Township and find an oasis of green.

It is one of the ways that the Turtle separates itself from the competition and there’s plenty of that with several public golf courses within a few miles of Turtle Creek’s location on West Ridge Pike, just east of the intersection with Swamp Pike in western Montgomery County. The course was the dream of Raymond “Sandy” Waltz, who first turned part of the farmland he purchased in 1937 into the Waltz Golf Farm in 1964 with two miniature golf courses, a driving range and a par-3 course.

The dream of Turtle Creek was kept alive in the hearts of the Waltz family even after Sandy passed and on Aug. 15 1997, Turtle Creek welcomed its first golfers for play. Even then they knew that golf was important, but it was the grass that mattered. That the grass was the foundation of the game and its quality can make the difference between a good round and a great one.

You can have the most challenging holes in golf, but if the golf course is not maintained, golfers are not going to keep coming back. And Turtle Creek’s consistently good conditions have kept public course golfers coming back for more for nearly 25 years. The 6,702-yard, par-72 Ed Beidel design always has the look of a golf course that is being well manicured by people who care about what they do and are good at it.

Sandy Waltz’s grandson Ray has been there for his entire adult life. A 1968 graduate of Spring-Ford and a 1972 Penn State graduate, Ray Waltz has seen the kind of work that was always done on the par-3 course at the Waltz Golf Farm blossom with the adjacent Turtle Creek in the mid-1990s.

“It was a transition from just working on the par-3 course to taking care of Turtle Creek,” said Ray Waltz, who works closely with superintendent John Welsh on the maintenance of the course and is in on all the Waltz family meetings concerning every aspect of the Turtle’s operation. “It was a matter of scale. We were doing a lot of the same things we were doing with the grass on the par-3 course, but at a much larger scale.

“But it’s still grass. You have to mow it, you have to fertilize it, you have to aerate it.”

Turtle Creek was very fortunate to have Welsh, fresh out of Penn State, on the staff when the course opened in August of 1997. He had fresh ideas and a fresh approach and has continued to focus on the latest ways to care for a golf course as techniques and equipment are constantly evolving.

And if you think Welsh isn’t part of the family, think again. He married Ray Waltz’s cousin Sandy, who teaches and coaches girls golf at Phoenixville High when she isn’t helping out with the food service at the Turtle. Ray Waltz is very direct when it comes to the importance of John Welsh’s role at Turtle Creek.

“When he first came here, he had just had an internship at Aronimink (Golf Club),” Ray Waltz said. “John’s family and he’s important to the day-to-day operations here. He’s not going anywhere. He’s here. It all starts with John.”

The late Bill Waltz’s wife, Bobbie, still lives in the Waltz Homestead, the classic farmhouse that sits hard by the 18th green of Turtle Creek’s risk-reward par-5 finishing hole and she can often be found in the pro shop, greeting golfers as they arrive for a round. Her daughter Lisa is a couple thousand miles away, a successful television actress in Hollywood. But she is as involved as everyone else is in the family’s operation of Turtle Creek, constantly brainstorming marketing ideas and updating the website.

There was nothing but uncertainty in the spring of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic reared its ugly head. But it quickly became apparent that golf was one of the few things you could do safely. By early summer, a golf boom was suddenly under way.

Oddly, public courses like Turtle Creek were presented with a problem they couldn’t possibly have anticipated. People were showing up to play golf in droves, making maintenance difficult. It was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

“We were shut down for a month in the beginning, so we were able to get some things done,” Ray Waltz said. “Then we reopened for walking only for a little while. We reopened completely on May 7. It was one golfer to a cart for a little while, but we have a big enough cart fleet that we were able to deal with that.

“We had 15 minutes between tee times for

a while, but when we were allowed to go back to 12 minutes, we did it right away. We mostly concentrated on fairways, tees and greens, but they’re always the priority.”

Turtle Creek took a little bit of a hit because many of the outings it plays host to were cancelled in 2020, but the uptick in regular play made up for the loss. Ray Waltz indicated many organizations are still playing a wait-and-see game before scheduling their outings for 2021.

“The outings were a big thing that we lost to the pandemic,” Ray Waltz said. “A lot of the groups haven’t committed to having their outings again yet.”

But let’s get back to the grass, and Ray Waltz can talk some grass. From the bent grass on Turtle Creek’s greens to the rye and bluegrass mix that populate the fairways to the fescue and bluegrass mix in the rough, the combination has proven to be a winning one.

But it is constantly evolving and, with all the fertilizing, it must be constantly monitored. Welsh often aerates some time after the District One Championship is played at Turtle Creek in October, but never to the point where the course is unplayable.

The fact that the best high school golfers in the region have competed in the District One Championship every year since 2002 is a testament to the high regard with which Turtle Creek is held.

The golf course got a needed break this past winter when it was covered by snow the entire month of February.

With the pandemic continuing to linger, it promises to be another busy summer at Turtle Creek. Ray Waltz, as usual, will be working hard to make sure Turtle Creek is in the kind of shape that will lure golfers old and new to tee it up there.

“A lot of people took up the game for the first time last year,” Ray Waltz said. “And that’s what you want is to have them come out here and try us. The challenge for us now is to keep them.”

As always, if you’re a public-course player looking for a golf course that’s always green, well that’s just par for the course at Turtle Creek. TSG

For more information about Turtle Creek Golf Club, call 610.489.5133 or visit

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