Golf News
06 MAY 2021
I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. Like you, we can’t wait for the golf course and club to open again. In the meantime, I would like to share my experience pitching in with the turf department to help out Bill McAllister, Christine Kumagai, and their team. I would also like to thank the members of our golf team that have traded in their golf clubs for work boots, a shovel, a lawnmower, and a bucket of sand and seed.
I guess I’ve always taken the condition of the golf course for granted, I mean I know the turf team is around countless hours during the week and they are always busy doing something but I had no idea how hard the work would be and how tired I would be at the end of the day. I’ve been lucky enough to try a few different jobs and almost every day I get home I can’t wait to go to bed. My first day was on a rough unit, this machine trims the areas around the bunkers and greens. I can tell you one thing we have a lot of bunkers on our course and some of the slopes around them WOW! Thankfully I had some great training from Bill and Christine and was able to avoid ditching myself in a bunker or worse any rollovers. Chris and Gary have been operating the fairway mowers, while Chef Mark Stone and Ryan de Leon have been on the rough mowers. Craig was on the green’s mower until one day last week when Bill came to me and asked, “can you cut greens?” I wasn’t sure what to say I mean “does he really trust me to cut greens!” So off we went to the 9th green of Copperhead for some much-needed training, I mean my dad wouldn’t even let me cut his grass growing up because he said “you cut it like your driving a Zamboni” whatever that means. After learning when to drop the blades, how to approach each new cut, and the clean-up cut I was ready to be sent out on my own. I’m not sure I took a breath the entire time and I’m pretty sure my fingerprints are permanently imprinted into the steering wheel. As far as I could tell I didn’t screw up too bad and they even asked me to cut greens again this week!
Overall, I can say to have the chance to work turf has been a great experience, except laying the sod on CopperHead 10 that was not fun at all! Fortunately for me, I missed doing the first 20 skids of sod on #11. I would much rather go back to doing Golf Pro things but the opportunity to learn more about the Turf department has been a cool experience. Here’s to hoping it ends very soon!
Nate Robinson
Director of Golf