Naturalise your carry areas and Improve cutting time by a quarter

As April 2014 arrives and Augusta-mania is in full swing, the topic of maintenance once again finds its way to the top table. This time though, this short article is not about how big your budget is and how large your greens department is but rather how can improve your course for little or no money with the team you have.

It goes without saying that courses need to be cut, but how much we should cut is the focus of this piece. More and more today, we are seeing courses maintained ‘wall-to-wall’ which is quite simply ludicrous and a waste of money. Whether in Kent, Cornwall or Cheshire, the member has to be King as they are the customer ultimately, but a lack of knowledge in course design has lead to memberships up and down the country believing that cut grass is somehow ‘tidy’ and the way forward.

Let’s get one thing straight, golf courses were never gardens, especially manicured gardens and certainly not Repton landscapes (apart from Sundridge). If you love classic cars, you buy them for the history, the style, the smell, the little nuisances of its make-up, the well-worn engine, the brilliance of the design and you’ll probably want to restore it lovingly from historic pictures and evidence of days gone past. The same applies to golf courses and the sum of their parts – each removal of a hole feature equates to a gradual deterioration of its overall DNA – a fall from strategic grace to diluted range golf. It is sad to watch.

The yearly cutting back of rough and vegetation and the bizarre ceremony of committees planting endless light blocking trees (often not indigenous), only make our courses more claustrophobic which is interesting as most members and committees will take hole corridor width over golf strategy any day and semi rough cut over any type of thick rough or ‘bundi’. Ironically, the historic courses which are enjoyed by thousands of members and guests every year were in fact, once open fields of heath and down land. Try cutting an encroaching tree down in the name of recreating days gone past and you will be shown the exit door for your efforts.

Typically, an architect will suggest: “Why don’t we grow this area in….”, and the GM/Secretary will invariably retort, “We can’t as members won’t like it”…. or “This valley between the tee and the fairway, why don’t we create a natural path to the fairway and vegetate the carry to add some texture, visual appeal and risk & reward..” GM/Secretary, “We can’t. We tried that last year and members complained they lost too many balls”. It is the member who is demanding that every square inch of rough is cut back and carries mown to within an inch of their lives causing the problems with course set-up today.

Let’s look at the positives. By simply reducing cut areas on your golf course by a quarter (effectively the first hundred yards of your golf hole) we will be improving free of charge:

• the quality of the asset,
• its visual appeal,
• the club bank balance,
• other club projects,
• environmental credentials of the club by cutting down omissions,
• flora and fauna across the site,
• low lying wet area control by vegetating,
• wildlife by establishing corridors,
• the texture of the course by adding contrast to the golf hole,
• aesthetics,
• the strategy of the hole,
• the risk and reward for the player and, most importantly,
• REDUCING the amount of time you see mowers on your course thereby improving the efficiency of our staff and the work required by our greens teams to present the test, daily.

What I have in mind for you is to analyse the first 100 yards in detail on each of your holes and yes, that includes the 1st. Do you really need them to look like your back yard, free of texture? Or could we add low level ground planting and rough grass to add feature? Could we create strategy by simply growing in the carry on a diagonal so that the back tees have the greatest carry and the shortest tees have the least distance to the prepared grass? We must challenge ourselves to reduce the cutting time per square metre on our golf course by a quarter and it would then be fair to say that this would lead to more time to dedicate to ‘other’ course structures such as bunkers, tees, greens and fairways.
I’m hoping by May to see hundreds of metres of white dotted lines across our carries to indicate where we are establishing and restoring former carries. It is no fluke that the top golf courses in the world have established carry areas and are spoilt by risk reward strategy from the tee. Try telling the secretary of Sunningdale that they should mow their heather clad carries to the ground because you keep losing your ball – I think you will be politely told:

“Thank you for your valued opinion but No. It’s been an integral part of our design and strategy for decades and we enjoy the challenge just the way it is”.

This article originally appeared in Kent Golfer, April 2014.