Although you probably wouldn't know it by the weather, winter is basically here. You will likely notice on the course that we have converted to our setup to reflect the season. Here are a few things that have changed for the next few months:
No Tee Markers. In order to help spread the play out on the tee boxes while the Zoysia is dormant and susceptible to overuse and winter damage, we have removed the tee markers. Winter golfers are asked to simply chose the best teeing ground to hit from. We have done this in the past and it works well for us to preserve the turf.
Winter Pins. Due to the fact that the greens will freeze and we are then unable to cut cups, we put winter pins on each green. This means pin locations will be random and each green will have two locations that we will select from each day. This just gives us a second option on each green to reduce wear on one area over a long period of time.
Cart Path Only. Everyone's favorite rule, I'm sure. We do this because the dormant turf cannot handle the traffic of golf carts and we would have significant damage if we allowed carts off paths through winter months. We have removed all directional rope and stakes for refurbishing so we just ask golfers to respect the Cart Path Only rules and keep the carts off the turf. Even when parking the cart, we prefer you leave it on the path completely. The majority of lost turf due to golf carts is actually from just slightly leaving the path or parking just into the grass.
Irrigation. If you have noticed in the last couple weeks there has been water running off and on throughout the days, it is because of this unseasonably dry weather. Our goal is to hydrate the turf so that we can blow out irrigation for the winter. The problem we are running into is that mother nature doesn't seem to want to play ball. Please bare with us while we run water during the day (our only time without the risk of freezing) and we should have it blown out and put to bed for the winter soon.
We will still have some great weather I'm sure for golf this year, so I look forward to seeing you out at Heart of America Golf Course.
