Municipal Golf Courses Face Tough Decisions

Dear Community Golf Fan,

Welcome to Reading the Green 2016 Vol.2; the four times a year, golf related brief, that focuses on improving the viability of Municipally owned golf facilities. Staples Golf Resource Group is a design and development consultancy that has served communities like yours for the past 14 years.

The purpose of our communication is to afford you an informed perspective in the areas of Industry Trends, Creative Usage for Golf Facilities, and Resource Management. Municipalities looking to make their courses more viable through facility assessments, master planning, renovation projects, and irrigation improvements have found our perspectives helpful.

Aerial Drone Mapping: The Future?

Did you know some golf courses literally house their own drone on site? Every couples of days or so it will automatically take flight, survey the course, re-doc, recharge, uploads relevant data, then send a comprehensive report through email, noting areas of potential concern. These frequent reports allow course operators to head-off problems before they get out of hand, sucking up precious time, materials and labor.

Drones have other useful applications aside from maintenance management that makes considering drone use feasible for course operators; marketing! Here's a video Staples Golf put together after footage of our in-progress renovation was taken for construction observation. We can't be on-site everyday, so having the superintendent send us footage from time to time is extremely helpful.

ASGCA's Water & Golf Case Studies Book

Responsible water stewardship is a theme throughout golf industry organizations, their seminars and symposiums, literature and messaging, but after awhile the term really does lose its intended impact. It becomes an abstraction, a cliche, and ultimately, meaningless.

This is something the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) is trying to avoid with their newest publication "Golf & Water: Case Studies in Water Stewardship." The aim of the book is to put real life, tangible case studies in the hands of those who understand the importance, but may have lost that motivation to make something happen at their golf course. Here's a video of the book being discussed at the Golf Industry Show earlier this year.

Public Course Grant Opportunity: Round Two

In 2015, the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the ASGCA got together to promote initiatives at public golf facilities that would improve quality and resource efficiency. Golf courses that were open to public and interested in having a USGA Agronomist and an ASGCA Architect assess their facility at no charge, applied for the grant.

Six facilities were chosen in April, and assessments are already underway. Here's a list of those who were selected, but interested courses that weren't selected, or didn't apply last time, should know that the program will enter into a second round of course selection (applications due by August 15th). The application can be found here. We recommend being as thorough as possible in terms of course specifics, and of course, if you don't already have a course architect in mind, submitting Andy Staples is appreciated!

If you weren't aware, we present Community Links webinars at no charge to administrators of struggling municipal facilities. If that's of interest to you, please tell us about your golf course by clicking here. Great decisions start with open ended dialog amongst willing parties, so let’s start a positive, open dialog today.

Sincerely,

Andy Staples, ASGCA