You are welcome for the Florida weather!
Ben, Joe and I traveled down to Orlando this week to find some better weather to bring up north. This week was the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America education conference and trade show. It also involves a national championship golf event that we all played in. My old friend from Kinloch and I finally placed in the four ball this year, getting card matched down to fourth place.
Ben and Joe choked pretty bad in the fourball but Ben pulled it together for the individual championship shooting 73-77 and racking up enough stableford points for 4th. This was Ben's first trip to the national conference.
I was lucky enough to keep my handicap just high enough to stay in the last flight of the tournament. The net side of this flight gets silly quickly so I'm always content to do OK on the gross side.
Joe took a swing at a $500 closest to the pin contest.
The robotic tech at the trade show was quickly trumped by the SpaceX rocket launch that we were able to see from the opening reception.
The highlight of the education piece was taking a facility tour of Bay Hill. They are 3 weeks out from the Arnold Palmer invitational so it was interesting to hear about their different practices leading up to the event.
The superintendent Chris Flynn gave some great background on Arnold Palmer and the Palmer family. Palmer was a blue collar man and the son of a superintendent. He wanted his golf course setup as hard as possible and was never worried with how it looked so long as playability was where it was supposed to be.
Back in the classroom we had a couple good agronomy classes followed up with a great reel maintenance seminar. There are so many small things that can go wrong with our equipment and especially the cutting reels, that can lead to poor turf. Keeping our equipment dialed in will always be a big key to our success.
