Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

 Well, it was a week that started with a few more frowns than smiles! We got back from the Virginia Cup at Farmington Country Club this week with more than one disappointment. Virginia was sitting pretty with a 5-3 lead after the four-ball and foursomes matches, but the Carolinas made a strong push in singles. The final few matches came down to the 18th hole in some very close, stressful, and entertaining fashion. Riley Pope from Prestonwood rolled in a 15-foot putt on the last match of the day, on a brutally above-the-hole putt, to bring the Cup home for the Carolinas. That was frown number one! Frown number two came Tuesday afternoon when I got back to the course and saw the impact the cold weather has had on our bermudagrass. We haven't had a hard frost just yet, but it's apparent that several close calls with freezing temperatures have taken their toll. The fairways have really started to show signs of traffic stress, both from golfers and maintenance equipment, as the gras...

 We are dialed in and getting ready for Club Championship this week! Prep is almost complete, and green speeds are hovering around 13 on both courses. It’s always fun doing setup and working with pins on two vastly different designs. With speeds like these, Sabot requires a little more attention to exact pin locations. For instance, on the #7 green, we have been skipping rolling behind the mowers to help meter the speeds on that green. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have too many good locations when speeds get on the higher end, so we have to be a little more careful with our setup. The heavy dews every morning have prevented us from really firming things up, but the recent sunshine and a little bit of wind have helped dry things out. We are getting close to where we want to be, and the guys are finishing up the last details to get everything ready for the weekend. As some of you have seen on the Daily Conditions Sheet that the Golf Staff sends out every morning, our frequency of mowing...

Hermitage has Ryan Montgomery out here this week for a couple of days, working on some photography for us. Check out some of his work on Instagram at ryanmontgomeryphotography . Here is some of his work from earlier in the week. We can’t wait to see some of the stuff he captured yesterday evening! Fall decorations are getting ready to go out next week. We’re still waiting on some more flowers and a few other things, but we’ll be getting ready for Halloween and moving toward Thanksgiving. Another productive week of maintenance! This year we have really put a focus on concentrating on maintenance and not as much on constant projects. We will focus on as many projects as possible November through April. We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty with staffing this time of year. Some of our seasonal employees have already left, and a few more are leaving shortly. The staff is doing a great job maintaining our levels of maintenance without being anywhere near full staffing levels. We were abl...