2020 Summer Course Update

2020 has been quite year so far and I'm  not sure many of us anticipated how much our lives would change. In some ways our work lives in Granite Bay GCM hasn't changed drastically as the golf course never completely closed due to COVID and actually before all this pandemic stuff we thought we would be closed to finish the turf conversion we started in 2019.  Then "The Project" was cancelled followed shortly after with COVID shutdown's and all of our worlds changed.

#2 FW low shady area. Stays wet, collects golf balls and without
Member divot filling help is pretty tore up in early August.

In many ways the cancelling of the project was fortuitous for the GBGC membership as you now had somewhere to go and exercise and socialize in a socially distant fashion, so the golf course has never been busier. To give you an idea of how busy, through July 2020 we have run 26,000 golf rounds through the course. All  of which were Member rounds. In the entire year of 2019 we ran 29,000 rounds including both Member  and Tournament rounds. Most of these rounds were done without the help of Members filling divots because we were required to remove all of the divot bottles from the golf course and single cart riders because we cannot send out carts with dual occupancy. 

#1 Granite Tee. It got wore out early in the 2020 season and needed
to be re-sodded. 

All this activity didn't leave as much of a mark on the course early in the spring months as the course's cool season turf is thriving at that time of the year. But as we progressed into the summer months where the course has historically struggled, the traffic is starting to take its toll. GCM has more then doubled its man-hours on filling divots but it is hard to keep up. Additionally we are trying to culture new hybrid bermuda surrounds and #17 FW to help create the playing surfaces we all want at the same time taking care of a cool season course in another Granite Bay summer while receiving historic traffic. Something had to give and the course is certainly summer worn in areas in early August. Weather hasn't been to bad even after recording 15 days over 100 degrees and another 15 days in the 98+ degree range. Nighttime temperatures have been cool and the two distinct heat spells have been proceeded by nice cool downs.

Newly installed tee-line at the rear of the driving range was
a traffic related add in the social distancing world we now live in.

View from the back of the range on the new tee-line

None of us know when we will get back to normal. We do know that the fall equinox is 46 days away and post labor day aeration is only a month away. Let the recovery begin!