How does a parkland course get ready for summer?
This article was featured in the Spring 2018 edition of Your Course magazine
Adam Matthews sits in his office pondering as he pores over charts and fixtures. The Moor Allerton course manager is in the hands of Mother Nature when it comes to preparing a course for the new season – and he’s well aware of it.
“We will get a course ready, and we will get people out playing and we’ll try to get the greens renovation done early doors, but you are relying a little bit on soil temperatures to get the recovery.
“Each year is different. Last year, we had a bit of a false dawn. We got out early, got the renovation done, and it was brilliant. Then we had three weeks of completely freezing cold, dry weather and it just stumped us.”
Moor Allerton sits on heavy clay soil and so while some other courses can dive headlong into their spring programmes earlier, Adam can still be waiting for his soil to dry out and the temperatures to rise well into the spring. All of which can cause delays.
He added: “You are really waiting for soil temperatures to come up to double figures before you go and chuck all your fertiliser on. You want to get that on, get everything going and push that growth. Then you can get out and start cutting, get your shaping done and your different types of grasses growing.
“That probably won’t happen until the middle of April, so the season is already going. If you start to look at feedingin the middle of April, you’ve then got two or three weeks until things really start kicking in.
“The middle of May is probably when we’re looking at saying ‘we’re in full cutting cycle and ready to go and prepare the course properly’.”
That should be an eye-opener for any golfers who turn up in April and wonder why the perfect course they’ve watched on the TV isn’t what they see in northern England. But the planning, to achieve what members see then, goes back into the previous autumn.
Adam spends hours in budget meetings, sorting out finances with committee chiefs, before building his programme around what he has to play with.
“It’s a good six weeks of intensive office planning work,” he explained. “Then you are relying on the spring giving you a hand for those plans to fall into place.
“There’s a lot we can do now. There’s better technology, the guys are better educated and there’s better products. But the big thing, for the spring, is getting that renovation work done.”
This year brings an extra challenge, as the club is hosting a EuroPro Tour qualifying event at the end of March. That means bringing the programme forward to produce a tournament-standard course for professionals - with spring having barely begun. Can he do it?
Adam confessed: “The greens will be good and the tees will be fine, but then you are in the lap of the gods as to what you can get out and do elsewhere.
“We’ll hold off the pre-season renovation work until after that event, which changes the way we’ll look after the greens through the winter. We’ll use different machinery – trying to keep things as firm as we can going into that event. We’ll do a bit more topdressing than we normally would and we’ll cut and iron the greens a lot more.”
Moor Allerton Golf Club
The Leeds club was founded in 1923 but moved to its current 27-hole complex, designed by Robert Trent Jones Snr, in 1970.
Former Ryder Cup players Howard Clark and Peter Alliss have both been attached to Moor Allerton. They aren’t the only famous faces to have walked the fairways, either. The European Tour was once a regular visitor and Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman and Nick Faldo are among the greats that have played it.
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