Diary of a course employee, end of the season

[James the Hogan Fan]

Just some random photos of the course. We are pleased with how it is starting to look.

 

 

[596]

Great pictures

I did the pre retirement job. My wife and I sold our business. She retired and I took the fun job of working at the golf course. I love it. Did it for a few years. Now I'm 64 and work only as a volunteer on the greens crew a few hours a week for a free membership.

[larrybud]

If I owned a course I would make sure the guy cutting the hole took his phone with him and set up an clinometer app, making sure no point within 4' of the hole was more than 2%, then if near a ridge, that the ball could stop short of the hole from every angle.

 

[James the Hogan Fan]

Well today wasn’t the best day:

 

 

I managed to back the sprayer truck into a ditch. It wasn’t a big deal besides being embarassing, but it did take an hour to get a tractor over to remove it. The back wheel slipped over the crown an high-centered, and it was stuck. We did manage to get it out and all was good again.

 

I also got busted for playing yesterday without calling the front desk when somene called me in. I know it’s my own fault, but I just don’t like going to the desk and bumbling in awful finnish about it. Going to have to deal with it now.

[596]

We had a guy on a large zero turn rough mower slide sideways clean into a pond a few days ago. He was still on the seat as it sank into the water. We used 2 backhoes to pull it out of the pond. Totalled the engine. It was taken away on a flat bed truck to get a new engine. Stuff happens.

[mallrat]

I am amazed at how much equipment they have you on. Here your first year you will only be on the sand pro or pull behind blower your first year. Fairways are all 8 yr plus guys, rough the newest guy is 12 years. You got lucky.

[James the Hogan Fan]

> @mallrat said:

> I am amazed at how much equipment they have you on. Here your first year you will only be on the sand pro or pull behind blower your first year. Fairways are all 8 yr plus guys, rough the newest guy is 12 years. You got lucky.

 

I don’t think we have enough people to get away with that. There are only 11 of us, 6 full time (super, assistant super/head gardener, mechanic, and 3 others) and 5 temps (myself and 4 more) + 3 high school kids getting a 3-week work-experience program credit.

 

The course culture is everyone needs to be able to do everything to some degree, and some specialize a bit more. For example, one of the 3 ”other” full-timers took it upon himself to get some rainbird training and he’s our irrigation specialist. The assistant super will be cutting a fairway in the morning and tending the clubhouse flowers after lunch. I do enjoy the different jobs and that no two days are the same.

 

Equipment I’ve been on so far:

Greensmaster triplex (greens)

Older Greensmaster Triplex (approaches/tees)

Reelmaster (fairways)

Sand Pro (bunkers, green sweeping)

Multipro (watering, some fertilizing)

Pro-core (aeration, both our walk unit and a tractor version)

Bobcat (loading mulch)

Propass (topdressing)

Rough mower (but only once)

[596]

We are the same. We have only 11 full time employees and 2 part time for 27 holes. And that includes the spray tech, asst sup and sup. Everyone has to do everything, nearly from day one.

[mallrat]

We have 6 full time and 12 seasonal but we get a good rotation of seasonal that come back. Plus Supt., Asst, 2 2nd Asst’s (myself included) and a mechanic. Only 18 holes but averaging 250+ rounds a day and 65,000 a year we all have to do everything but being a Poa course we all specialize in hand watering ?

[James the Hogan Fan]

This week was the big club championship, 54 holes of stroke play, no handicaps. I was given the task of hole locations for the two days and set about it. With a rules official/tournament director coming in to set up the course, he gave me a yardage guide which marked out the general areas for the flags on each day. I then went in and made up the spots and paced them for the pin sheets. We then took a drive around the course and marked the ugliest areas as GUR, although in some places he let it be because 'we can't make the whole fairway GUR'. I might disagree with that on one hand but on the other hand we wouldn't have enough paint.

 

The whole week my boss had been trying to get me to play and so I registered at the last minute and did play. An uneventful 85 in the first round with something like 9 3-putts. When I turned in my card for the first round I was handed another one for the afternoon session.. No one had bothered to tell me there was an afternoon session. I had assumed 36 holes 18/18, not 54 36/18. I was glad my afternoon was free and shot an 83 in the second round on Saturday. (84 would be to my cap). During the first round the rules official comes up on his cart and tells me there is a problem, namely that the 8th hole cup is not letting the flag out. And although the new rules don't make this a big problem, it's still a problem. So when I played past the maintenance shack, I ran in and grabbed some cups and the puller-hook and gave them to the official the next time I saw him. He changed them out and all was right again.

 

Today, Sunday was a round to forget, 89 in miserable wind and rain, in which I tripled the 18 and 17 handicap holes, had a ball wedged under a bunker lip, tripled a hole from 150 yards out in the fairway because I couldn't see the ball to hit it in the rain, and got hit in the chest by a drive from an adjacent hole at 200 yards. I was about ready to snap my putter and putt with a 4 iron, and was otherwise thinking about how much I wanted to go home.

 

Once the round was over, I stubbornly played 9 more in 40 strokes, which included a missed 2 footer and a chip-in bogey. I guess the tourney pressure got to me. This week there are a number of company scrambles and goings-on, I think I'm not going to play much this week and focus on my irons on the range. They've really been letting me down.

[James the Hogan Fan]

Just some photos from a rainy day, but it was a tough one. We have a concert on the range this week, so lots of work coming to prep for that.

This storm brought a half inch of rain in an hour.

[CCTxGolf]

This is a pretty freaking cool thread. Thanks for the read and the updates

[Brennanf]

Spent a few college summers working at a local 9 holer. Great times. Cut grass 6-2, play 18 every night. Night watering with a case of beers . Classic

[Hparkgolf]

This brings back memories of college summers working at a resort course.

 

Once drove a reel master straight into creek bed with a 6.5’ drop...totaled the mower. Was cutting fairways at 4:30AM for a tournament.

[James the Hogan Fan]

You might be wondering about irrigation and sprinklers, and just how much work goes into keeping them up and running. Some quick facts:

 

Our system is a fully automatic rainbird system with over 1000 heads. Each head has Eagle 751 series rotor and can be electrically controlled. The entire system is pressurized at all times and an electronic valve within each sprinkler turns it on or off. Each individual sprinkler can thereby be turned on independently of the system, or can be run with others as part of a watering program. Additionally a sprinkler can be set to run manually with a wrench or set to off (not responsive to electric signal)

 

The system has 3 pumps working to maintain 9 bar, or a touch over 130 PSI. This is sufficient to blast a jammed rotor 15-20ft in the air, or, after blasting off a relief valve, create a 20-foot high geyser at something like 2-3 gallons/second. For maintenance, a system of pressure and drain valves allows sections of the course to be de-pressurized without shutting down the pumps (which would then need to be re-started)

 

The ground is never static and as it shifts, stresses are placed on the pipes and joints. Sometimes enough to cause leaks:

 

 

This leak has caused the turf to bubble, or float up on a pocket if water beneath the surface. This is... bad.

 

The only way to fix it is to dig it up, locate the leak, and fix the pipe. In this case we thought the leak was the sprinkler and dug there. It so happened that the leak was (go figure) directly underneath the dirtpile we made. A T-joint had shifted enough for a hairline crack to develop, which was causing our problems. This was a much bigger repair than anticipated, and we had to just leave it until we could get more manpower.

 

As always, course photos:

 

[596]

Nice pictures.

We just replaced our irrigation system a few months ago. We now have grass in some rough and some fairways where we never had grass before. Our system is the same as yours. All electronically controlled individual heads. It's also connected to a weather station that can turn the system on and off if we get too much or too little rain.

[mallrat]

T joints stink. Always nice when a it’s an easy slip fix

[James the Hogan Fan]

Haven't posted in awhile because I've been on vacation and the season is winding down. I've been meaning to talk about the concert we put on back in August, but hadn't got around to it yet. I'll get to those when I get the pictures moved over, but in the meanwhile today we changed the cups/hole liners out on the course. We have two sets that get rotated through every once in awhile. We cleaned them in the dishwasher and then put a fresh white sleeve in.

 

These holes come with a specially sized plastic sleeve that holds in by springiness alone; there is no adhesive. If a sponsor has paid for a particular hole, we put their label on the white sleeve before we insert the sleeve into the cup.

 

As I went I also took stock of the flagsticks that need new ferrules and which cups seemed a little worn out. The old cups will have their old plastic sleeves removed, be run through the dishwasher, and then placed in the storage closet for next season.

 

Now that fall has started, we also drag a rope across the fairways to knock off the dew. It looks ridiculous but it is a ton of fun. No pictures of that though.

 

And as always, some course pics.

 

 

 

[James the Hogan Fan]

So I had mentioned at one point we were having a concert, and we did. Tagi on Pop featured Juha Tapio, Lauri Tahka, and Ville Valo & Agents on the Tapiola driving range. Now what all did that entail?

 

The concert was scheduled for Saturday night and preparations on our end began on Tuesday with the usual weekly range maintenance. In order to bring in the generators and concert equipment our access road needed to be reinforced, and for the safety of our patrons, all of the drains on the range needed to be filled in with gravel so no one would trip. My specific job was to raise the net along the edge of the range out of the way so that concert vehicles could zip in and out underneath it, as visible in this picture:

 

 

On Wednesday the generators were delivered, and on Thursday some crews arrived to unload the concert equipment. A host of concert prep activities kept us busy throughout Thursday afternoon before the big setup day Friday. At that point our job was to turn the lower deck of the range into a concession area and hide all the mats, dividers, and trays into our storage area. Someone had had the idea to keep the range open for the Friday tournament,

 

so the poor concert guys were dodging golf balls as they set up the stage. We made the field decision to close the range at that point, and once we had cleaned everything up, the concert folks took over setup and we were back to maintaining our golf course.

 

(And of course, we got to go to the concert for free, which is always nice!)

 

 

 

 

[Golfnuck]

That is a very nice club house and range area.

[James the Hogan Fan]

Well Im down to working only 3 days a week or less what with school, and the course is slowly beginning to grow dormant for it's winter hibernation. We likely won't see temps above 55° F until next spring. It's also been raining, so we've had to dig supplementary drainage.

 

 

Also, since we are past the equinox, the days are beciming increasingly shorter. Whereas in september one could play at 5:45 at earliest, now sunrise is about 8. This means it can be dark:

 

 

The picture of the pipe is intended to show the outflow from our drainpipes during rainstorms.

 

The course is hoping to stay open through the first few weeks of November.

[No_Catchy_Nickname]

Always in an interesting read. I'm a little surprised to hear that the course may stay open into November in Finland. Later than I expected.

[Big A HG]

Being from North Dakota in the United States, I also found it interesting you guys are typically open in November. I know the ocean currents keep you warmer, but I didn't realize it was that significant. For reference, our latitude is two degrees south of Paris, so you are MUCH farther north, yet we are going to be lucky to get to the end of October for golf. In fact, some courses have already shut down for the year. Heck, we've already had snow (though it has melted...for now).

[James the Hogan Fan]

So it ends. With the daily lows in the 30's most of the days were spent in frost delays and making capital improvements. As the season winds down we've been reducing manpower, and today is our farewell dinner: Only the four titled employees: Superintendent/greenkeeper, assistant greenkeeper, irrigation tech, and mechanic. They will work 2-3 weeks more and then we'll lock the doors.

 

But it means my time is up. The course will be open on random days weather permitting and I might drop in to play, but otherwise it's been a good run.

 

 

 

I'll post about the golf course closing process in a bit