Hermitage CC Golf Course Management

 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...

 Monday started with some sod prep and dead tree removal around the Club and on Sabot #9. We still have a few more trees to take care of over the next several weeks, including Sabot #2 and #3 and Manakin #2, just to name a few. The team hammered out quite a bit of work before the noon shotgun, so it was a productive start to the week. Fall is definitely in the air! We’ve had a few nights in the 40s this week, and the bermudagrass has noticeably slowed down. In fact, we mowed fairways for the first time this week today as we prepared for the Senior Member-Guest.  Quite a change from the 3-4 mows a week we were on not too long ago. As we transition into fall, we’ve raised the height of cut and reduced mowing frequency to help put the bermudagrass in the best possible position heading into winter. There isn’t much time left for these warm-season grasses to grow and build the strength they need to withstand the traffic that comes with perfect fall golf weather and a busy tee sheet...