Well at least for a while. Too much of a good thing can actually cause many problems with the turfgrass and the roots of the plants. Saturated soil conditions are breading grounds for disease and the lack of oxygen in the soil can cause root die back. Rain can also be a good thing, it is amazing to see the grass green up after rain events, even if I have been watering without the rain. Rain has the best coverage of all and no irrigation system can match the consistency of rain. But for now, I and all of us have had enough. There are a few courses just north of us that will be closed until Friday, some reports of well over 9 inches. We are fortunate no really wind damage and everyone is safe, my prayers do go out to all have had some such of misfortune due to the weather lately. The extended forecast does look pretty good.
Heavy rains are very hard our my staff, we have had to shovel the sand in the bunkers now 6 times this year. It is a very time consuming process but we will get the bunkers back in shape by Friday. Also, I am sure your home yard is starting to grow like crazy with the warm, humid weather. The same is true for the roughs, we will start mowing in the morning and most likely not stop until the roughs have been mowed at least twice this week. Please bear with us on some grass clumps we will do our best to get around the course quickly.
Overall as expected the course is starting to recover finally. I am seeing the greens growing some good roots and the overall color seems to be back. With this flush of growth it can be expected that the greens will be a little slower. We will be mowing and rolling the greens to try to keep the speeds from getting to slow.
I would like to talk a little about my course setup procedures at Hawks Landing. I am the one that is responsible for the set up at Hawks. I do have a theory behind the way the course plays daily and do put a lot of thought while I set the pins and sometimes even the tee markers. What I try to do is give the membership a different set up daily. I do not necessarily have hard days and easy days, some may seem like they are always hard when you play but that is not my intent. I want the course to play fair and at a championship level at least Wednesday through Sunday. My goal is that if there may be a extremely hard pin placement i will always give you a very easy pin placement. I do try to keep the par 5 playing opposite from each other. example; if the pin is in the back on 3 the pin will be either in the front of 9 or in the middle. Same goes for the par 3's. I work myself around the course taking into account for right to left shots and left to right. I like to mix it up a lot so you need to play all types of shots into the greens. There are some hard greens on the course and some with very few pin placements when the greens are fast. I never have bad day on the course I get to see the sun rise very day and the course as I say "wake up". I do want to challenge the membership and also want everyone to have a great round of golf. This is why I set the course up daily. This gives me a chance to see each green, scout for problems and make sure Hawks plays to a championship level daily. Most courses let anyone and everyone set up there course no thought is given to this tasks I enjoy this part of my job and I hope that the membership enjoys the set up when they play.