The winter is a fitting time for many golf courses to evaluate their performance over the past year, adjust programs accordingly and develop standards for the year ahead. I recommend evaluating your golf course’s performance over months and years and not focusing too much on what happened over a single day or week.
Many facilities have developed golf course maintenance standards, which are often a blend of guidelines, expectations and best practices. Among other factors, maintenance standards should be based on resources, environment, seasonality, architecture and amount of play. Golf facilities should begin with an assessment of the property and a basic understanding of their players’ ability and experience when playing the course.
Unfortunately, many maintenance standards focus on things like height of cut, amounts of nitrogen, or frequency of maintenance practices. Maintenance standards should be focused on delivering the expected outcomes over appropriate time frames instead of dictating the details of how to get there. Focusing on inputs and routine practices also creates dozens of pages that probably aren’t necessary. Superintendents know what it takes to produce good playing conditions, it’s knowing what’s important to your specific golfers and how to deliver that consistently that’s the tricky part.
Outside of putting green performance metrics and turfgrass health, golf courses need to have a baseline understanding of golfer experience across all players. The USGA has spent many years researching the factors that impact the golfer experience. Metrics including satisfaction, pace of play, frequency of play, and revenue may all be appropriate to include in maintenance standards. Advanced metrics can also be used to evaluate golf course setup and ensure you provide a reasonable challenge for your players.
Using a metrics-based approach can be intimidating at first, but it will pay dividends. The USGA has created tools like the GS3 ball and DEACON to allow golf courses to measure, record and analyze key performance metrics and relate them to the playing characteristics that golfers care most about. The simplicity of a data-driven, outcome-based set of maintenance standards can be difficult to sell if your actions and methods are not carefully explained, but this approach empowers the maintenance team to find the best path to the best possible outcomes instead of dictating inputs.
Southeast Region Agronomists:
Jordan Booth, Ph.D., senior director, USGA Course Consulting Service – jbooth@usga.org
Chris Hartwiger, director, Agronomy – chartwiger@usga.org
Chris Neff, agronomist – cneff@usga.org