Acid Test

With all of the recent humidity we are experiencing a flush of growth which will aid in the recovery of the turf from transition both around the golf course and of course the greens. The greens recovery program is in full force and includes: plug repair, verticutting, hand spiking, spot and full aerification and coming soon weekly topdressing. This upcoming Monday will be week four since the start of the aerification in June, and three and half weeks since we finished the aerification. This year was more aggressive since we combined the drill and fill along with the aerification process thus the recovery time will be increased.

Back of 13's Green August 2004 -- Before My Arrival

7's Green August 2004 -- Before My Arrival

The pictures above were the conditions of Avondale's greens in 2004 before I was hired. These were bentgrass greens that died every year costing the Club $100K plus every year to repair. There weren’t transition issues because the turf was meant to live the entire year ... but due to poor drainage and lack of air movement they died year after year. Upon my hiring in 2005 I was tasked to convert the greens to bermudagrass using a budget I never set up -- $104,000 in total to convert all of the greens. This never addressed the underlying issues which we have back addressing every year since with continuing success.

Acid Test as a Turf Manager: This has been brought up so I felt I needed to address this issue by giving a comparison outside the industry. Let’s look at a stock broker as an example: In 2008 and 2009 we saw the worse days on the stock market since the 1930's and many lost their fortunes thanks to misguided investments by a few. Was this crash the stock broker's fault for not being able to stop this? -- most likely no. The good stock broker took a bad situation and with some shrewd investments recouped his client’s losses, and maybe even made a profit.

So let’s compare: In November we had one of the worse weather conditions for overseeding that the Valley has seen in years and depending on when a golf course overseeding the effects were devastating in the form of pythium (disease) outbreaks. During that time I took a bad situation while staying in the budget guidelines and within 6 weeks of the start of overseeding gave not only fantastic conditions but enabled the sales team from JC Resorts to sell the most memberships in the Valley (61 in total) by providing excellent conditions on the golf course. Was the weather that led to this problem in November my fault? -- no. I faced the issue head on and fixed the problem.

So let’s look at transition this year: It is a fact that if you overseed in the desert of the Coachella Valley this ryegrass will die along with the Poa Triv. The facts are that we buy seed that will do exactly that just so we can have a base to overseed in during the next season. Increased seeding rates to repair what disease took out in November along with issue we historically have with our greens led to issues with some of our greens -- is this my fault, in part since I am the one who re-seeded the greens late October to ensure a quality golf course for the season which by the sale of memberships aided in Avondale to have the funds to remain open as a high-end golf course. Here is the acid test: Am I fixing the problem caused by transition? -- yes. Is transition my fault? -- no.  I and my team are working hard to quickly address the transitions issues while keeping our budget in line. Other than that this is not much more my team or I can do to make this difficult time better.