News and Updates

Time to pull back the curtain on a hot topic at nearly every golf course in the country…GREEN SPEEDS!

First, it is important to understand the challenge we face each day when setting up the golf course. The most difficult aspect about managing your course at OGC is catering to the vast diversity of the golfers we have at the club. Fairly regularly, we can have parents that are just introducing their kids to the game, double digit handicappers who came out to socialize, and past U.S. Open participants playing the golf course at the same time. Each of these contingents have different preferences regarding hole locations, fairway height, rough density, bunker firmness, and yes, green speeds. To put this in a different context, it would be like asking a chef to make a meal for 200 people that they all must love but it must be the exact same meal for everyone.

Each day, we do our best to anticipate who will be playing and what that setup should look like. Our goal is to balance that day’s setup directly in the middle of what the highest and lowest handicappers playing on that day would find ideal. In regard to green speeds, that means that some people playing that day will find them to be too fast and others, too slow. After five seasons, we have a very good idea of what that speed is for each group and each day.

So, what goes into obtaining desired green speeds? It starts with data. Each day, we collect an array of information from the greens that we use to make decisions on how to handle green maintenance. We measure green speed, the volume of clippings that we removed during mowing, and make notes on their physical appearance. Below the surface we are regularly checking root growth and structure as well as the physical characteristics of the soil profile. We have in-ground sensors as well as hand tools that tell us what the moisture content, salinity levels, and soil temperatures are at different depths. Each of these observations are recorded, charted, and input into a database. Over the past several years, we have been able to make some fairly concrete connections of how each of these factors relate to each other on our property and how they will affect green speed.

We then take the above data and formulate a plan, generally ranging from one to two weeks out. We factor in who we predict will be playing, how much play we will be receiving, upcoming tournament and events, and weather patterns. The most common question that I get asked at the club each day is “Did you mow and/or roll greens today?”. Simply put, that is the most basic part of the plan. If we are in season and the golf course is open, the answer 99.9% of the time is “yes”. However, obtaining desired green speed is a much more dynamic process than that. Green speed is a product of how much, or how little, friction is being applied on the golf ball from the turf. With today’s agronomy, we have an amazing amount of control over the how the plant behaves. We can spray products to reduce the growth rate of the plant, make the leaf blades smaller, and bring the leaves closer together. We can apply products that hold water at the surface of the green or move water through the profile. We can also perform physical practices like brooming and vertical mowing to make the turf more upright and rolling it to smooth it out. All these practices will change the amount of friction on the ball—both positively and negatively—and thus alter green speed. These alterations don’t often occur overnight, rather each takes several days to take effect. The morning mow/roll just maintains the results of all of the other practices that were performed and the products that were applied. Think of it as daily brushing your teeth between dentist visits.

I have somehow made it to this point with only the briefest mention of Mother Nature. The weather is the single biggest influencing factor in our ability to obtain and maintain green speeds, particularly humidity and dew point. We can perform the same exact practices to the greens and see as much as two feet of difference on the stimpmeter if the dew point is in the 70’s verses the 50’s. Not only can weather factor into the daily speed of a green but pushing the greens for speed when the turf is under environmental stress caused by severe weather could result in catastrophic turf loss. With that being said, we do provide the best conditions possible within the parameters that weather allows us, but the health of the greens is always our top priority.

Lastly, I want to touch on the notion that when it comes to green speeds that the faster they are, they better they are. In a recent interview that Gil Hanse gave on the Golf Channel leading up to last month’s PGA Championship, he stated “We would rather compromise green speeds than compromise great architecture”. What did he mean by this? The setup at Southern Hills featured rolling greens that stimped 10.5-12 throughout the week and vast quantities of closely mowed turf in the green surrounds. This allowed setup officials to put holes on subtle slopes, near runoffs, and hidden behind hazards. The golf course did not need protected by speed; a point illustrated by Justin Thomas’s winning score of -5.

How does that relate to our greens? Our greens were built around 1950, before the stimpmeter was distributed. For those of you that may not know, the stimpmeter was invented in the 1930’s as a tool to make sure that greens were consistent, not to see how fast greenkeepers could get them. There was only one in the world, and it was owned by Mr. Edward Stimpson, who recorded different green speeds from 1946 to 1973. He reported the green speed at the 1963 U.S. Open at 2.7 feet. The stimpmeter made its public debut in its first national championship in 1976 at the U.S. Open, the same year that approximately 1,500 clubs across the country participated in a USGA study on green speeds. Overbrook was included in this study and its reported average for that year was 6.6 feet, on par with the U.S. average of 6.5 feet.

I say all of this to illustrate the point that our greens were not necessarily designed to run at 13 on a stimpmeter on a daily basis, rather that should be, and is, the outlier. Nor am I petitioning that we return to the good ole’ days of greens that roll eight or nine feet. I am merely pointing out that the faster our greens are, the less variety we can have in our setups because we are handcuffed by the amount of reasonable hole locations they have.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a closer look at the 12th green, as it may have come up in some of your recent conversations. Above is a laser scan that shows percent slope on the green. Through experience, we can correlate percent slope to pinnable areas as they relate to green speeds. When greens are 13’+, we can fairly put a hole on any dark green area (0-2.5% slope or 8% of the total green). At 12’-13’, we can move into the light green (2.5-3% slope or 16.6% of the total green). At 11’-12’, I am comfortable putting holes on the yellow and orange areas (3-4% or 58.1%). The Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, green speeds were 12.5 with and the hole was cut in the orange area. I am still hearing about it five days later.

I could do a separate dissertation on each of the above paragraphs, but I have already taken up too much of your time. My goal was ultimately to illustrate that hitting target green speeds isn’t as simple as cutting lower or rolling more. It is a process that takes time and is very deliberate. It’s also not our goal to make the greens as fast as possible each day. Rather, we strive to provide conditions that will provide most of the membership playing that day with an enjoyable round that has plenty of variety while preserving the long-term health and integrity of the golf course. I hope this gives you some insight on how and why we manage our greens the way we do.